PANKAJ SHARMA
How can one even
think of implementing the idea of National Register of Citizens (NRC) to the
whole country after experiencing the bizarre and haphazard way with which it
has been executed in Assam? It will not only be premature to extend NRC in
other states at this juncture but be a social, cultural and political foolishness.
Is it not an indication enough that the process adopted in Assam was so
seriously awry that more than four million residents of a single state are out
of the Citizens’ Register?
If a process that ascertains the Indian
citizenship keeps a nephew of India’s fifth President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s
nephew Ziauddin Ali Ahmed, can we take NRC as the final word for telling us
that who is an Indian and who is not? The deputy speaker of Assam’s state
assembly was denied the place in the list of citizens. Even the people who have
represented their electorate in the state assembly, those who have worked or
still working in the police services and army could not find a place in NRC. Descendants
of freedom fighters had been excluded from the list and they are now illegal
migrants. A man and his family who fought the British in 1857 is out of NRC. 55
per cent of those dis-enfrancished in Assam are women
Under the process of NRC implementation,
people who have been living for generations, that is centuries in places that
were made part of Assam only in 1874 and still live there, were asked to prove
their citizenship under section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The act
provides a cut-off date of 24 March 1971 for distinguishing deemed citizens and
illegal immigrants. For this one has to submit prescribed pre-1971 documents.
This has essentially meant treating them as immigrants based mainly on their non-Assamese
linguistic identity.
This part of the process was
problematic. The people living outside ‘proper Assam’, the territory that the
British annexed to their empire by the Yandabu pact of 1826 which is now called
upper Assam, are all immigrants. Their
ancestors have been living in those places since before the Ahoms came into
upper Assam in the second decade of 13th century. But most of them are declared
as illegal immigrants. They are marginalised, landless and illiterate people
who, due to their economic and social status, do not have the prescribed
documents.
Poor and deprived section of our
population generally does not have access to documentation. If in a state of
three and a half crore people, 40 lac could not produce documentary proofs of
their being Indian, just imagine what will happen if NRC is extended to the
whole country? I am sure, millions and millions of otherwise natural citizens
of our country will fail to satisfy the demands of NRC. Any such process is
bound to create a chaos no will serve no purpose.
I agree with those who feel that Indian
citizenship is the greatest privilege, because only those who have purified their
souls by protecting cows—not cows of Bangladeshi origin—for seven consecutive
births are reincarnated as Indian citizens. That’s the reason that just only
one in six people on our planet enjoys the honour of being an Indian citizen.
Therefore, even if a need to maintain a national register of Indian citizens is
strongly felt by a particular section of our policy makers, I would request
them to refrain themselves to go for a burton with an eye on immediate
electoral gains.
Writer is the Editor & CEO of News Views India
and a national office bearer of the Congress party.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment