For any Indian born during the eighties and from a middleclass background, the most exciting thing that happened in the family was the purchase of a television set. It was no less a festivity for friends and neighbors to rejoice. Children looked forward to the familiar tune of Doordarshan logo appearing on the TV set. It was a state controlled media that entertained, informed, and educated people to herald a new era of mass media.
Of all the programs entertaining or mundane, there was a particular non-commercial advertisement that often played few times a day on the national television. It was primarily about adult literacy program, with a catchy song, “Padhna Likhna Seekho, O Mehnat Karne Walon” (Learn to read and write, O hard working people). Clearly enough, it addressed the adults who belonged to the lowest strata of society, who did not even know how to read and write any language.
The message was not quite relevant for a school going kid, but as the song was very simple to sing, it made its way to lips often unnoticed.
Both my paternal and maternal grandfathers were in government jobs one in the district court the other in police department, and they were definitely educated, so it did not stand relevant to me as a child. Still I vaguely remember receiving my paternal grandmother’s handwritten post cards (after grandfather’s demise), which one of my cousins used to write for her. Now I realize perhaps she was not adequately literate to write on her own, or her failing eyesight didn’t allow her to do so. Had she been alive today, how clueless she would have been to assemble the requisite documents to prove her Indian citizenship? She was born even before 1950, when the Indian constitution in its present form came into being. While she is no more, many of her compeers are still alive and unprepared to face the new challenge.
The government of India’s Human Resource Development website states that in order to promote adult education, the National Literacy Mission was launched in 1988 to provide functional literacy to non-literates between the age group of 15 to 35 years. The phrase ‘functional literacy’ is not elaborated further to give a fair idea of what the term exactly refers to.
On the Global literacy index India still ranks 124 out of 160 nations listed. That can give us a fair idea of the literacy rate of the general population. It is pertinent for every individual to realize the enormity of the paperwork that the current central government of India is putting on the shoulders of over 1.3 billion people out of which over 25 percent (74.04 percent literate) of the population is still non literate.
A simple search on google on documents required for NRC registration states the requisite documents in order to establish citizenship are birth certificate, land document, Board/University Certificate, bank/LIC/Post Office records, Circle Officer/GP Secretary Certificate in case of married women, electoral roll, ration card, etc.
For the poor, the documents that hitherto mattered the most were ration card and the voter identity card. The socialist nature of the Indian constitution guaranteed the have-nots with subsidized ration, while the democratic statute gave them the identity of being Indian and the power to choose a government of their choice.
For an educated, urban Indian the list of documents might not be bothering. Yet, the hundreds of millions who live below poverty line, in a shack or a make-shift home throughout their life, and give birth to babies with minimal medical care need to worry. India’s development story and its emergence as a global power is a paradox in itself. One the one hand, it is home to some of the richest people in the world and it is one of the fastest growing economy, on the flip side, right in the heart of its commercial capital, Mumbai, millions live with little or no basic amenities that make a decent living. So, the government in its full knowledge cannot act as a nonchalant ruling power without weighing upon the implications of a policy or act.
The first state to bear the brunt of NRC was Assam when the government, ignoring the ground realities of the implications went ahead and put at stake the life and liberty of 1.9 million people. With 120 days to prove their citizenship, these unfortunate souls who could not make to the list are living under the constant fear of eventually landing in detention centers. I call them unfortunate because it is beyond fathomable reason to know how members of the same family make it to the list while one among them is left out even after producing relevant documents. Such unexplained cases are in abundance.
This brings us to another very significant point of documentation process in India. Anyone who has ever dealt with the ‘babus’(officials) of government offices in India can identify with most of the harrowing cases of negligence and corruption in the very functioning of governance. I remember the first time I applied for the voter’s identity card. A state government official collected the particulars, then I was photographed and after a few days I received my voter Identity card. To my utter disgust, in the identity column I found it was marked ‘Male’. It is one of the many cases of negligence.
Highhandedness of government officials and bribery culture to make things work is not a new phenomenon. With the officials having the power to accept and reject a given document, where fallacies in official documents in the spellings of individual names and other particulars is a common occurrence, rejecting a document as inadequate is very convenient for the presiding official. The fear is not unfounded as the Nobel Laureate Abhijeet Banerjee opined and apprehended the same recently during a television interview with NDTV.
So the question arises why is the NRC so crucial to the central government? It was primarily because the Bhartiya Janta Party promised in its 2019 manifesto that it ‘will throw the illegal immigrants out of India’. The party is known for its pronounced displeasure of Indian Muslims and often indulges in hurling communal slurs every now and then. By its self-imposed delirium, the party either considers Indian Muslims as Pakistanis or Bangladeshis.
In its utter ignorance and defiance of historical facts, the BJP refuses to acknowledge that the 14 percent (200 million) of the Indian population, refused to go to Pakistan and decided to call India home, back in the year 1947. The Cheraman mosque in Kerala is an evidence of Muslim existence in India hundreds of years even before the establishment of Delhi Sultanate. The bigoted belief of a political party cannot take away the Indian identity of the country’s citizens.
The current central government under the BJP, passed the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 to primarily introduce a new clause where it promises to grant citizenship to all religious minorities except Muslims from the three neighboring countries Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who have come to India before December 2014. So, on the one hand, with NRC it is putting the citizenship of millions of Indians at risk, and on the other hand the government is rescuing all the other communities through CAA, if they cannot produce documents of citizenship under NRC.
The Muslims who might not be able to produce the lengthy list of official documents to prove their citizenship will have to face the menace of detention centers. The role of presiding officials in accepting and rejecting the documents is also vital, which can be manipulated to achieve the discriminatory policy of the central government. The United Nations Human Rights body has already raised concern and termed the Act ‘Fundamentally Discriminatory’ in nature.
By following NRC with CAA, the present government has made its stand very obvious and has left nothing to imagination. It is strange that the government is endorsing selective philanthropy for minorities of just three neighboring countries and is choosing to ignore the Rohingya and the Tamil refugee crisis. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution in December last year to strongly condemn the rights abuses against Rohingyas and other minority groups in Myanmar. Similarly, the Citizenship Amendment Act, remains absolutely silent on the predicament of 59, 000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees who have roots in India, but were displaced by the British regime and have no country to call their own.
Citizenship is related to a sense of belonging. It is not a privilege but a birth right, which when denied results in a crisis of identity. To prove your Indianness to an authority that is biased and hateful, is a test of the highest order, and so is the instinctive reaction against it. If the streets of the country are lighted with protest against a regime, then surely there is a problem. With the Supreme Court refusing to stay CAA, the heart and the spirit of India stands betrayed.
(Views expressed by author are personal)
Also read | What is the controversial Citizenship law? Why North Eastern states are burning over it?
Also read | Violent protests on Citizenship Amendment Act unfortunate and deeply distressing: PM Narendra Modi