The issue of citizenship

Ever since India became independent, we have taken a modicum of pride in being citizens of the world’s largest democracy. Today, there is greater ground for worry than pride, because we are beginning to realize that the greatness of a tion is not reckoned in numbers. In fact, huge numbers can put us at a disadvantage when we seek a better quality of life. Any sensible democracy ought to be far more concerned about being able to remain a democracy in the true sense of the term. This is because we now have democracies all over the world (more particularly in Africa) that have the trappings of democracy, but have degenerated into dictatorships or oligarchies with no concern for the welfare or rights of the people. The people are no more than the means for putting political leaders in power through the mechanism called elections. An honest democracy must put the aspirations and legitimate needs of the people above all other considerations. There must be room for debate, difference and dissent. The best of democracies are judged by how far they are willing to accept dissent without even thinking of punitive measures. At present, our major lapse as a democracy stems from the establishment’s unwillingness to tolerate any kind of dissent. Dissent is being equated with sin. Readiness to conform has emerged as the most cherished virtue. This insistence on conformity has the potential of erasing all dissent—a great disservice to the cherished ideals of democracy. 

In India, a major threat to democracy has arisen from what the Union government proposes to do about granting Indian citizenship to persecuted Hindus and other minorities from neighbouring countries. The listing of the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 for business in the on-going winter session of Parliament comes as a major blow to the very ethos of Assam. All the opposition to the Bill from Assam ever since it was introduced in the Lok Sabha in July 2016 has failed to move the Centre to have second thoughts about it in the light of the fears and protests of the people of Assam. One might perhaps have taken a somewhat tolerant view of such a bizarre piece of legislation if there was some assurance that States like Assam, Bengal and Tripura that are already overburdened with migrants from Bangladesh, will be spared from the operation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016. In fact, what is rather amusing is a very recent statement made by Ranjit Dass, BJP chief of Assam on this issue. “Nowhere is the term Bangladeshi Hindus mentioned anywhere in the Bill. It clearly mentions minorities from neighbouring countries,” he said. The Bill seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1965, to give citizenship by turalization to persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities who came to India before December 31, 2014. What it could have specified but did not is that the Bill is designed with large number of Bangladeshi Hindu migrants in mind who are already in Assam and have lived in the State for some years. So the Bill comes as an easy way of legalizing the presence of the lakhs of Bangladeshi Hindus who are already in Assam. There is no need for anyone to actually come from Bangladesh and seek Indian citizenship on arrival. Many are already here. The moment the Bill is implemented, they turn from illegal Bangladeshi migrants to Indian citizens without having to move anywhere. If this ‘humane and altruistic’ act on the part of the Centre adds to the electoral advantage of the ruling party, who is there to complain? That precisely is the game plan of the Centre. We can cry ourselves hoarse opposing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and pointing out how unfair this is in a democracy, without the BJP batting an eyelid.  

What the Centre’s obduracy has done is to create a major rift between the BJP and the AGP—the major partners in the ruling alliance of Assam. After all, how can they be expected to remain together when their stands on such a major issue as citizenship are diametrically opposite? The AGP held a citizens’ meeting in Guwahati on Thursday and adopted resolutions against the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, and an AGP delegation left for New Delhi to meet Prime Minister rendra Modi, Union Home Minister Rajth Singh, senior BJP leaders and other allies. Likewise, the BJP State unit also sent a delegation to New Delhi on Friday with the totally opposite objective of impressing upon the BJP’s central leadership the importance of ensuring the passage of the Bill. According to reports, Union Home Minister Rajth Singh gave the AGP team a patient hearing and assured it that the Centre would not take any step that would go against the interests of the indigenous people. AGP spokesperson Manoj Saikia who was part of the delegation had impressed upon the Home Minister that if the Bill was turned into a law, it would spell doom for the indigenous people as they would be reduced to minorities in their own land. The AGP team also met MPs of nine regiol parties including Shiv Se, AIADMK, DMK, Trimul Congress, Shiromani Akali Dal, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Biju Jata Dal for support in opposing the Bill. According to Saikia, the leaders of these parties said that they would stand with the people of Assam and oppose the Bill. What remains to be seen, however, is how well the leaders of the political parties have understood the problem and how forceful and convincing their opposition to the Bill turns out to be. BJP State unit president Ranjit Dass has raised an important point that calls for a satisfactory explation. Countering the AGP’s stand on the Bill, he said, “Bringing in the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 was in our election manifesto. They (the AGP) knew it, and after that only they came to an alliance with us and supported us. Now, if they oppose, it is their decision. They have neither informed Sarbanda Sonowal nor any other senior leaders of the BJP over the issue.” It is important for the AGP now to provide a satisfactory answer to the point raised by Ranji Dass about the AGP’s decision to have an alliance with the BJP despite its knowledge about the BJP’s stand on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and also to prepare a video disc of the issues involved with convincing arguments on why the Bill needs to be abandoned if Assam is to be saved. 

What passes our understanding is the ibility of the Centre to appreciate the problem being faced by Assam due to decades of large-scale immigration from Bangladesh, mostly illegal. The bulk of the 3.1 million migrants to India from Bangladesh are in Assam. The most important reason for their preference for Assam is proximity to their place of birth. Most of them are loath to travel long distances to other parts of India. Another important reason is the similarity of the soil of Assam to the soil of Bangladesh. Since almost all the migrants are cultivators, they prefer to migrate to a place where the soil they will have to cultivate is familiar rather than to more arid parts of India where the soil is better suited for different kinds of crops that they have never grown. The Centre is well aware of these facts and about the total number of Bangladeshis now in India. Despite having access to these facts, why did the Centre issue visas to 933,659 Bangladeshis in 2016 and to 1,289,322 more of them in 2017 to visit India? There should have been a strict embargo on visas issued to Bangladeshis. It is a well-known fact a very large number of these 2,223,017 Bangladeshis with visas to visit India have either overstayed their deadlines or have disappeared after coming to India. The regrettable part of this development is that the Indian government is uware of how many of these visitors from Bangladesh with visas have done the vanishing trick. But the basic question still remains: why issue visas to over two million people from a country that has already about 3.1 million migrants in India. Do people from other countries get over two million visas in just two years to visit our country? 

The government has now been talking of certain measures to stop the large-scale illegal migration from Bangladesh. One of them is sealing the India-Bangladesh border by 2018. Why only now? What prevented India from sealing this intertiol border in the same way as it sealed India-Pakistan border decades ago? Could it be that our rulers wanted the illegal migration of illegal voters to remain undisturbed? Henceforth, political affiliations in Assam are going to be unimportant. All politicians are going to be judged by what their stand is on the citizenship issue.