The
CAA/NRC Distilled
CAA/NRC is
against the Constitution. CAA/NRC is against the people of India
Suresh Kodoor
·
Constitution – The Blueprint for
building a modern India: Indian
Constitution has been a magnificent response from our founding visionaries to
the question of how to transition the Independent India into a modern
nationhood. Indian Constitution put forth a magnificent blueprint for the
generations to internalise and put in practice as they get engrossed in the
process of nation building. The
architects of our Constitution were confronted with a stark reality that India is
a society where ‘inequality’ and ‘injustice’ are accepted norms in every sphere
of social and economic life, institutionalised through the deep-rooted caste
system. Constitution was to undertake the herculean task of freeing the people
from the clutches of ‘laws of Manu’ and walks them into the new world of
Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
Dr.Ambedkar was
emphatic in his final speech to the constituent assembly where he said, “If the
parties place creed above country, our independence will be put in jeopardy a
second time and probably be lost forever. This eventuality we must all
resolutely guard against. We must be determined to defend our independence with
the last drop of our blood”. We must resist firmly and fiercely
all attempts to put creed above the country lest the Constitution is undermined
and eventually our hard-fought freedom is lost forever. In hindsight, Dr.Ambedkar
appears perfectly prophetic when one revisits his warning, “Bhakti in religion
may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-
worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”. Proponents of our Constitutional ideals wanted
us to never lay our liberties at the feet of anyone, or to trust anyone with
power which would enable him/her to subvert our institutions.
·
Constitution and Citizenship: Part II, the Chapter titled
‘Citizenship’, of the Indian Constitution governs the Indian Citizenship. ‘The
Citizenship Act 1955’ legislation was framed aligning well with the
Constitution, which never linked religion and the citizenship. There are five
ways to become an Indian citizen as enlisted in the Constitution. By birth, descend,
naturalisation, registration and territorial incorporation. Religion has never
been a criterion in any of these five methods. As per the Constitution, if one
is born inside the territory of India, he/she becomes an Indian Citizen (by
birth).
·
Amendments to ‘The Citizenship Act
1955’: The
Citizenship Act 1955 has been amended multiple times in the past. The first amendment was in 1986
following the signing of ‘Assam Accord’ between the Central Government and
Assam Students Union following an extended agitation by the AASU demanding
deportation of illegal migrants. Thus, 1986 amendment added a clause which
mandated that at least one of the parents has to be an Indian citizen for
someone to be eligible for Indian citizenship by birth. In the year 2003,
Vajpayee’s BJP Government brought in another amendment to the Act. For the
first time, 2003 amendment introduced the term ‘illegal migrant’ in the Act and
amended the requirement for availing citizenship by birth by making it
mandatory that the parent who is not a citizen of India could not be an
‘illegal migrant’. i.e After 2003
amendment, someone will be qualified for Indian citizenship by birth only if a)
he/she is born in India, b) at least one parent is an Indian citizen and c) the
parent who is not an Indian citizen is not an ‘illegal migrant’. However, the
definition of the ‘illegal migrant’ was still not based on religion, but was
someone who had travelled to India without passport and other travel documents
or someone who had overstayed his/her visa period. The 2003 amendment also
directed the central government to construct a nationwide citizenship register
(NRC).
·
CAA brings in religion to the
citizenship: The
current amendment, Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, under Modi’s BJP
Government has linked religion to the Indian citizenship for the first time in
the history of Independent India. CAA has essentially altered the definition of
‘illegal migrants’ included in the Citizenship Act by the previous BJP
Government in 2003, thus completing the task left ‘unfinished’ earlier. The
intent was always to deny one section of the population, namely Muslims, their
rights.
·
What CAA amended:
Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 primarily added following clauses to
completely sabotage the secular essence of the Indian Constitution and for the
first time ever in the history of India started treating people based on their
race and religion in front of the law.
Ø CAA added the following paragraph to
the definition of the word ‘illegal migrants’:
“Provided that any person belonging to Hindu,
Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh
or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December,
2014…. shall not be treated as illegal migrant for the purposes of this
Act;"
Thus declaring that the people belonging to any
of the six religions from any of the stated three countries (Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Afghanistan) are not to be treated as ‘illegal migrants’ even if
they had entered Indian territory without passport or other valid documents or
had overstayed their allowed visa period.
Ø
CAA
changed the time duration one had to reside in India before he/she could apply
for the Indian citizenship. Before the amendment, one of the requirements for
citizenship by naturalisation was that the applicant must have resided in India
during the last 12 months, and for 11 of the previous 14 years. The Act
relaxes this 11 year requirement to 5 years for persons belonging to the same
six religions and three countries.
Ø The amendment also has added a
clause to provide for cancellation of OCI. The registration of Overseas Citizen
of India (OCI) cardholders can now be cancelled if they violate any law, thus
practically leaving them at the mercy of the government.
·
Subverting the Constitution since
2014: Even prior to CAA, effort to segregate people on the basis of Religion
has been ongoing since the Modi government came to power. Passport Act and
Foreigners Act were amended in 2015 itself. These amendments permitted the same
selected groups chosen on religious grounds to stay on in India if they had
come before Dec 31, 2014. Same wordings that are part of CAA now were added to
these two rules in 2015. The intention of the government to exclude people of a
specific religious faith from exercising their rights and denying them the equality
that the Constitution guarantees are very evident and been part of a larger
plot.
·
Penalty is Rs.500 for the chosen six
and Rs.35000 for others: The extent to which the sinister design to
alter the structures and procedures of various institutions had spread its
claws would alarm anyone who is concerned about the democratic and secular
fabric of India. Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) altered its
penalty fee structure in 2019. As per the new fee structure, anyone who
overstays their visa period by more than two years will have to pay USD 500 (Rs.35000/-),
of course with a caveat that the violator is not someone who belongs to any of
the selected six religions (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, Christian) from the chosen three countries (Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Afghanistan). If you belong
to any of the non-Muslim communities, you need to pay only Rs.500/-. For the
same crime, a Muslim has to pay Rs.35000 while a Hindu needs to pay a mere
Rs.500/-. If the period of overstay is
between 3 months to 2 years, the penalty amount is Rs.21000 (USD 300) for
Muslims and Rs.100 for others. And
worst, the amount for these six communities are specified in Indian rupees
while it is shown in terms of USD for others. The message ‘India is for Hindus’
cannot be conveyed any more blatantly than this by an official agency.
·
CAA mocks at Article 14: Part III of the Constitution lists
out at length our Fundamental Rights. No Governments has powers to pass any
acts that violates or takes away these fundamental rights. Equality has been
one of the hallmark values and rights that the Constitution upheld and
guaranteed its people. Article 14 under ‘Right to Equality’ in Part III of the
Constitution mandates that all persons inside the territory of India must be
treated equally in front of the law. Article 14 reads as below:
“The state shall not deny to any person equality before law or the
equal protection of the laws within the territory of India”
The usage of the word
‘person’ may be noted in particular. Article 14 guarantees that once someone is
inside the territory of India, he/she is entitled to be treated equally before
law irrespective of whether the person is an Indian citizen or not. While the
word ‘citizen’ was used in the very next section, which is Article 15 (which
states that the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds
only of religion, race, caste, sex and place of birth or any of them), usage of
the word ‘person’ in Article 14 reveals without any doubt the intent of the
founders of the Constitution and their insistence to ensure equality, the
touchstone of a modern human civilization, to everyone who enters Indian
territory. CAA mocks at this very fundamental
pronouncement in the Constitution and thus violates the Constitution.
How concerned and aware
the Architects of our Constitution was about the deep rooted inequality in our
society is evident from the below sentence in the Article 15.
“(2) No citizen shall, on
grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be
subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to—
(a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public
entertainment; or (b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats,
roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State
funds or dedicated to the use of the general public”
Probably no Constitution
in the world would have had to go into such specific details where the
Constitution had to direct its people not to discriminate and restrict some
sections of their own fellow citizens from using wells, tanks etc! The
realization that there existed (and still exists) a large section of people who
were denied the rights to use even public wells, tanks and roads in the name of
caste hierarchies and practice of ‘untouchability’ forced the founders not to
leave anything to chance. It also speaks volumes on how serious the founders were
when they spoke about equality. We must be extra vigilant not to allow anyone
to tinker with it and take away from us one of the most key fundamental rights
that the Constitution guaranteed us.
It would be ironical that
those who gain citizenship by virtue of the discriminatory clause of CAA over
their counterparts who would be denied the same privilege only because they
chose to exercise the right given to Indian citizens by Article 15 (freedom to practice
the religion of choice) would pledge by the same constitution that guarantees
no discrimination on the basis of religion.
·
CAA Classification has no rational
relation with the Act’s objectives: The Supreme Court has time and again
made it amply clear that the Article 14 forbids any class legislation
(legislation that discriminates on the basis of religion, caste, race etc).
However, the court has also observed that it is permissible to make classifications
under Article 14 provided certain conditions are met. The court also has
interpreted ‘equality’ in no uncertain terms on numerous occasions and has
stated unequivocally that such classifications must be ‘non-arbitrary’. The
court has stated that ‘equality and arbitrariness are sworn enemies’ and the
arbitrariness is nothing but ‘whim and caprice of an absolute monarch’ (Supreme
Court in EP.Royappa vs Tamil Nadu Case (Nov 1973).
CAA makes
following classifications:
o
It distinguishes migrants from Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Afghanistan from migrants from all other countries
o
It
separates those belonging to the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi or
Christian faiths from all other persons, including Muslims
o
The privilege is conferred only to
those who have entered India before December 31, 2014.
The above
classifications do not qualify the criterion of being ‘reasonable’ and do not
have a rational relation with the objectives of CAA (as stated in the Statement
of Objects and Purpose of the Act), which is to offer protection to the
‘persecuted’ who have come to India.
o
If objective is to protect
only minorities from neighboring countries with a state religion: the exclusion
of Bhutan and Sri Lanka defy any rational relation between the object of the
Act and the classification it creates
o
If to offer the law’s
protection only to migrants from neighboring countries where Islam is a state
religion: the Act then leaves out certain communities of Muslims from these
countries (who are minorities in those country, like Ahmadiyyas, Hazaras etc)
as well as the Jews, agnostics and atheists
o
If the objective of the
CAA is to protect migrants from countries that were originally a part of
pre-partition India: then the inclusion of Afghanistan and exclusion of Myanmar
means that the classification can have no rational relation to its objective.
o
The Act also separates
religious persecution from other forms of persecution, while in reality someone
persecuted for political reason is in no way in a better position than those
persecuted on religious grounds
o
The Act seems to assume that it is
only persons from countries with a state religion are subjected to persecution.
The case of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar proves
otherwise
o Finally,
there is no rational in arbitrarily deciding a cut-off date of 31 December 2014
Thus, the CAA
is blatantly discriminatory in nature and hence wouldn’t stand the scrutiny of
the law of the land
·
The immediate trigger for CAA: The trigger that led to the introduction of CAA
is the shock and embarrassment BJP had to suffer from the NRC experience in the
state of Assam. The NRC in Assam busted the false claims of BJP that millions
of Bangladeshi Muslims are staying as illegal migrants. Out of the 19.07 lakhs
who were missing from the final Assam NRC list, 14 lakhs turned out to be
non-Muslims. The reality that most of the people migrate looking for livelihood
and has nothing to do with religion of course is not in line with BJP’s divisive
agenda and hence they were spreading the false narrative of ‘religious
persecution’ as the primary reason for migration. Since only 5 Lakhs ‘illegal
migrants’ were Muslims and other 14 Lakhs belonged to Hindu and other
communities, BJP had to find a way to ‘save’ the Hindus from being branded as
‘illegal migrants’ and hence the CAA to exclude them from the purview of the
definition of ‘illegal migrants’. The disappointment was too evident as BJP
leader Himanta Biswa Sarma made no effort to conceal his anguish as he stated
“The NRC has names of people which should not be in it and has left out names
of people which should have been in it”.
It is nobody’s guess who the people he was expecting ‘not to be in
the list’. Thus came the CAA into picture so as to ensure that all those
excluded from the list, except Muslims, would not have to go ‘stateless’ and be
‘illegal’.
·
Horrendous experience of Assam NRC: If Assam NRC (National Register of Citizens) experience
is anything to go by, the amount of suffering and miseries an India-wide NRC
would bring in is unimaginable. The horrific experiences and heart-breaking
stories that the Assam people had to endure going through the process of NRC is
countless. The NRC saga in Assam had its beginning in the
year 1951. After the student struggle shook the state in the 80s, the ‘Assam
Accord’ was signed in 1985 and one of the conditions in there was to update the
NRC. An NGO organization (Assam Public Works) approached the Supreme Court in
2009 asking to update the NRC and to remove undocumented migrants from the
voter’s list. That is how the NRC made its first appearance in the Supreme
Court. SC ordered updating of NRC in Dec-2013. After almost a five-year long
ordeal and 1500+ crore wasted, the draft released in July 2018 found 40 lakhs
missing from the list! One could only imagine the extreme agony those 40 lakhs
must have gone through in their desperate attempt to get back into that ‘holy
list’. Prayers of almost half of the
‘fortunate’ ones were answered it seems as the final NRC version released on 31
Aug 2019 brought the number down to 19.07 lakhs. Sadly, some of the names
present in the earlier list were missing in the final list and vice versa. The
entire exercise was simply chaotic and thoroughly mismanaged. The missing names
include former MLAs, retired Army Officers and their families, former Indian
President’s family, Government officials and lakhs and lakhs of genuine Indian
citizens and their families from all walks of life and faiths. Some of the
families found themselves in deep mess with a few of the members declared as
‘Citizens’ while others were dumped as ‘illegal migrants’. They all,
irrespective of which faith they belonged to, had to endure the agony of taking
endless trips to Foreigners Tribunals, running from post to pillars and
pleading with whomever they could get hold of, just to prove that India very
much belongs to them as well. Imagine how worst the situation could slip into
if such an exercise had to be undertaken India-wide, especially with the
communal animosity prevailing in the country at this juncture.
The most
glaring and shocking omission was when 60 small children were left out of the
NRC whose parents were part of the list. These small children were facing with the
horrifying prospect of being sent to detention centres. Only the Supreme Court
intervention in the last minute saved them from the nerve-wrecking experience.
SC ordered that the children should not be sent to detention camps or separated
from their loved ones at any cost. The case was brought to Court’s attention
only because an NGO intervened. How many such cases would come up and how many
of the affected families would be able to afford going to Courts is anybody
guess.
·
All Indian citizens, especially the
poor and marginalised, will be most impacted by NRC: The narrative being propagated is that no
Indian citizens will be impacted by the NRC. Really? As we know, 3.29 crore
people of Assam had to apply for being included in the NRC, out of which 40
lakhs were omitted for some or other reason. They all had to run around
desperately for weeks and months to arrange for the ‘legacy data’ to prove that
their parents were born in India and are not illegal immigrants. While lot many
people wouldn’t even have their own birth records, leave alone their parent’s,
the most impacted are poor and marginalised. Where are they supposed to bring
the documents from to prove their parent’s birthplace? A similar India-wide
exercise would only create complete chaos, panic, wide-spread corruption,
religious profiling and a large scale civil unrest. Everyone will be put
through the ignominy of havening to prove that he/she belongs to this place
where his/her ancestors of so many generations lived and died. Every single
citizen, irrespective of his/her religious affiliation, will be under the mercy
of the government and that is exactly BJP is trying to achieve so that people
would be under terrible fear and will not raise any dissenting voice against
the government or their agenda of hatred.
·
CAA has everything to do with NRC: Another lie being propagated is that the CAA
has no link with NRC. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The CAA and NRC
are closely interconnected. The plan is to first implement the CAA which will
give citizenship to all non-Muslims from the three countries and then to
implement NRC to identify ‘infiltrators’. This link has been made clear many
times by the BJP leaders and the ministers in the government.
Home Minister (April 2019): “First the CAB will come. All refugees
will get citizenship. Then NRC will come. This is why refugees should not
worry, but infiltrators should. Understand the chronology—CAB will come and
then NRC. NRC is not just for Bengal, it’s for the entire country.”
Home Minister (Nov 21, 2019) in Rajyasabha: “The process of National Register of Citizens
(NRC) will be carried out across the country.”
Home Minister
(Dec 21, 2019) in Parliament: “We will bring the NRC across the country.
Not a single infiltrator will be spared.”
·
NPR and NRC are linked: National Population Register (NPR) is the means
to achieve the NRC. Thus, NPR is inseparable from NRC. The relation is simple; NRC
is the list of Citizens, NPR is the means to add names into the NRC (and a way
to filter out the ‘unwanted’) and CAA is to selectively sneak in Hindu ‘illegal
migrants’ into the NRC while keeping out the Muslims. The NRC requires no
separate new law to be passed as it is already part of the Citizenship law via
the 2003 amendment. The rules detailing the process through which the NRC will
be implemented were also adopted in 2003. The rule clearly states “a population
register will be prepared by collecting information relating to all persons who
are usually residing within the jurisdiction of the local registrar. The local
register of Indian citizens (as part of the national register) shall contain
details of persons after due verification made from the population register.”
The link between NRC and NPR was unambiguously
stated by the Minister of State for Home Affairs Mr. Kiran Rijju in Parliament
in the year 2014 itself where he pronounced, “The Government has now decided to
create the National Register of Indian Citizens based on the information
collected under the scheme of NPR by verifying the citizenship status of all
individuals in the country.”
The Home
Ministry’s annual report of 2018-2019 (Ch 15, Para 15) says, “Government of
India has approved a scheme of creation of National Population Register (NPR)
in the country by collecting specific information of all usual residents. NPR
is the first step towards creation of National Register of Indian Citizen
(NRIC).”
Now that the
blatant lies about NPR and NRC (that they are not linked) perpetrated by BJP
Ministers and leaders, right from the Prime Minister himself, have fallen flat,
the Government has started claiming that the NPR is part of the census. This
also is completely untrue. Census and NPR are completely two separate things
with different questionnaire, format and purpose. Government has included six new questions to
the NPR survey questionnaire. The new questions include name of the father and
mother, their places and dates of birth and the details of Aadhaar. The
objective is to create basis for rejection as per the 2003 amendment to the
Citizenship Act (which states that at least one parent should be Indian citizen
and the other should not be an ‘illegal migrant’). It is a lie to say that the
NPR is part of the census.
The NPR
information, after the enumeration, will be cross checked with the AADHAR data
and is entered into the Local Population Register where the letter “D” (to
indicate ‘Doubtful Citizen’) will be placed against those individuals who the
enumerator feels have not submitted sufficient ‘legacy’ data to convincingly
prove their citizenship! The onus would be then on those who have received “D”
stamping to prove their credentials, by hook or crook, opening the flood gate
for widespread targeted profiling, discrimination, harassment, bribery and
persecution of the masses, especially of those belonging to the minority
communities and others who raise dissenting voices and do not fall in line with
the RSS racist divisive agenda.
·
CAA/NRC is a step towards realising
RSS dream of ‘Hindu Rashtra’: The real
objective behind the act is to fast forward the journey towards ‘Hindu
Rashtra’, widening the polarisation by targeting people of a particular faith.
RSS is committed to convert India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ where other religious
minorities are forced to live as second class citizens without any fundamental
rights or privileges. The key to unravel the bigger plot behind CAA/NRC lies
with reading M.S.Golwalker, the RSS ideologue who idolized Hitler and German
Nazis and wanted to adopt the Nazi model of racist annihilation to purge India
of religious minorities. Golwalker
suggested that the minorities live in India wholly subjugated to the majority
Hindus, claiming nothing, not even citizen’s rights. And, the CAA/NRC is an
attempt by his disciples to strip the minorities of their citizen rights as
desired by their master.
“The
non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and
language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must
entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture
... In a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country,
wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights” (Golwalkjer,
“We or Our Nationhood Defined”)
“To
keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the Semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its
highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh
impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root,
to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to
learn and profit by” (Golwalker, “We or Our Nationhood
Defined”)
RSS and their ultra rightist associates are
desperately trying to make Golwalkar dream come true. They are accelerating the
path to his ‘Hindu Rashtra’, destroying our constitution, all its institutions
and the very heart of Idea of India in the process. They know that the Constitution of India is
the biggest hurdles in their march towards destroying the idea of a liberal,
secular India and hence the desperate drive to destroy the Constitution itself.
RSS never had accepted the Indian Constitution as they always held the view
that “Manu Smrithi” should be the Constitution of India, as written in their
mouth piece ‘Organizer’ on Nov 30, 1949, “The worst about the new constitution
of Bharat is that there is nothing Bharatiya about it. The drafters of the
Constitution have incorporated in it elements of British, American, Canadian,
Swiss and sundry other constitutions. But there is no trace of ancient
Bharatiya constitutional laws, institutions, nomenclature and phraseology in
it… But in our constitution, there is no mention of the unique constitutional
development in ancient Bharat. Manu’s laws were written long before Lycurgus of
Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti
excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and
conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing”
The CAA/NRC is strikingly and horrifyingly
similar to the Nuremberg Laws the Nazis implemented in Germany in 1935 as a
precursor to strip the Jews of their citizen rights. The message is not lost on anyone about what BJP/RSS is trying to do
with this country. They are throwing our great country to the dogs. They are
dividing the heart and soul of our nation into pieces. Instead of drawing
strength and inspiration from the diversity of this great garden, they want to
pluck out the roses and orchids and destroy the whole Garden itself.
·
Real issues sidelined: In
this time of extreme distress and with an economy in complete shambles, the
need of the hour is to focus on the real issues affecting the lives of the common
people and restore the trust. An insecure state can hardly instil confidence in
people or encourage them to focus on productive endeavours. Instead of inspiring
people to stay united, BJP/RSS is busy inventing new ways of dividing people
and making them suffer even more. A party which cannot see people of India as a
whole and can see them only as races and sectors has no moral right to be
ruling this great country. The present struggle is to preserve the Constitution
and to protect the very idea of India that celebrates diversity and embrace
equality and liberty. The struggle against CAA/NRC therefore is also a struggle
to save India from the fascist forces of hatred and division.
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Suresh
Kodoor
Ph: 9845853362
