Citizenship by force?
WITH EYES WIDE OPEN D. N. Bezboruah What happened in Barpeta on Wednesday was perhaps long expected. When an elected democratic government is out to win elections solely on the votes of aliens illegally residing in the State, it has already sent out the unequivocal signal that the aliens can do no wrong, that they are �more equal� than the real citizens and that they will be treated as sons-in-law of the government as long as they vote for the ruling party, take three or four wives and multiply like rabbits to create more voters for the coming years. It is only a government that has subverted the Constitution, dispensed with immigration laws and thought of nothing else except winning the Assembly elections for the third successive term next year to perform a diabolic of hat trick of regime that can do such harm to its own people. It is useful to take a good look at what the issues were for the All Assam Minority Students� Union (AAMSU) when it organized the massive demonstration against the revision of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) of 1951. For the sake of appearances the demonstrators said they wanted the 1951 NRC to be revised only in terms of the electoral roll of 1971. But this was something that the Union government and the Home Ministry had already conceded and the Assam Government already announced regardless of how unjust this was for the indigenous people of Assam and for the citizens of India as a whole. What is the cut-off date for those who had migrated from Pakistan and were seeking the rights of citizenship in India? Article 6 of the Indian Constitution has stipulated that it is the 19th of July 1948. Then how is it there was such gross discrimination in the case of Assam by making the cut-off date for such migrants to be Indian citizens in this State alone? Was the Constitution amended in the case of Assam for some inexplicable reason to make the cut-off date 25th March 1971 in the case of Assam alone? No such thing was done. All that happened was that an agreement was signed between All Assam Students� Union (AASU) and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad on the one side with the Union Government and the Assam Government called the Assam Accord on August 14-15, 1985 in the presence of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi. But can an accord, not even ratified by Parliament have the force of law even to supersede the provisions of the Constitution? It cannot. Article 13(3)(a) of the Constitution is very clear on this. It says that �"law" includes any Ordinance, order, bye-law, rule, regulation, notification, custom or usage having in the territory of India the force of law.� No wonder, even the Indira-Mujib Pact that was sought to be regarded as a law never had the force of law because it was never ratified by Parliament. And now, of course, it is time-barred. In other words, it was the Assam Accord that overrode Article 6 of the Constitution and made the cut-off year for migrants from erstwhile Pakistan to Assam 25th March 1971. It was an act of very serious discrimination against Assam just as the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 1983 was. It will not do to forget what followed the signing of the Assam Accord. Almost all the senior Muslim members of the Congress in Assam were up in arms against the party. They held that with Congress governments both at the Centre and in Assam, the signing of the Assam Accord was a betrayal of the minorities in Assam. They quit the Congress en masse and created the United Minorities Front (UMF). But ironies will never cease. A few years later, the Assam Accord became the sine qua non for every dispute regarding citizenship for migrants from erstwhile Pakistan to Assam and the issue of citizenship for their progeny. The UMF members never quoted the Constitution of India in such matters, but swore by the Assam Accord as though they were quoting the scriptures. So much so, that Section 6(a) of the amendment to the Citizenship Act refers to the provisions of the Assam Accord in deciding the citizenship of migrants from East Pakistan/Bangladesh and their progeny. Here is a classic case of a law of the land being modified on the terms of an accord which is not law according to the provisions of our Constitution. And it is this bizarre fact of our legal provision that has been a cause of much rejoicing for the UMF! Any law is only as good as its implementation. If a law merely remains in the law books, it is as good as not being there. That is why, it can be said now that Assam is one Indian State without any immigration law, because ever since the IM(DT) Act got struck down by the Supreme Court and the Foreigners Act of 1946 got reinstated, the Assam Government has decided not to implement the Foreigners Act at all in the case of Bangladeshi immigrants. As such, now we have no immigration law at all in the real sense! The revision of the National Register of Citizens of 1951 became imperative because having messed up the whole business of illegal influx of Bangladeshis into Assam by subverting the Constitution and the laws of the land with something like the Assam Accord and the IM(DT) Act, what was eventually ensured was not a cut-off date of even 25 March 1971, but rather an unchecked illegal influx of Bangladedshis into Assam even in the 1990s and the 21st century. The IM(DT) Act which entrusted the detection of illegal migrants to tribunals and placed the onus of proving nationality on individual Indian citizens of Assam for 22 long years did a lot of mischief. It helped the State government to perpetuate its pretence that there were no Bangladeshis in the State and that everyone called a Bangladeshi was actually an Indian citizen! This continued illegal influx from Bangladesh is proved by the very abnormal increase in the number of voters in the State during the last two years. As such, a revision of the NRC of 1951 became absolutely essential to stem the tide of continued illegal influx into the State and to clean up the electoral roll of the State by at least eliminating the names of those from it who had come to Assam after 25 March 1971. And in order to arrive at a fair revision of the NRC of 1951, we had to have the NRC of 1951 for all districts of the State, so that the names in the latest electoral roll could be checked with what is known as the �search and sort� computer programme. But the NRC of 1951 is not available in all the districts of the State, and there is good reason to suspect that the State government itself is partly responsible for the disappearance of the NRC 1951 where it is not available. As a consequence, the government has had to rely on other documents like electoral rolls to initiate an even imperfect job of revising the NRC. If electoral rolls had to be taken, the obvious choice would have been one closest to 1951. Unfortunately this has not happened, and the Home Ministry, despite its earlier assurances, finally succumbed to the State government�s demand that the 1971 electoral roll should form the base document for the revision of the NRC. The worst part of Wednesday�s Barpeta riots over the demand to scrap the revision of the NRC had a section of the rioters and members of the AAMSU demanding that the 1971 electoral roll had to be used for the revision of the NRC. In other words, they were demanding that the government should do what it had already planned to do. However, the main thrust of the demonstration (that turned violent very quickly and led to vandalism of both private and government property) was that the initiatives to revise the NRC be scrapped altogether�obviously because a revised NRC would show up how many lakhs of Bangladeshis are migrating to Assam illegally even today, more than 39 years after the cut-off date stipulated in the Assam Accord. When lathi-charging and tear-gas shells proved quite ineffective, the police had to resort to firing�first in the air and then at the rioters. It is possible that the shooting could have been avoided if the police had taken a grip on the developing situation and not waited too long to take action against �precious� Congress voters. What is absolutely stunning is the immediate knee-jerk reaction of Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi who said that the revision of the NRC would be scrapped. The voice of reason was promptly heard from Dr Bhumidhar Barman, Revenue, Rehabilitation and Assam Accord Minister, who told a meeting of senior citizens, representatives of different organizations and top government officials of the Barpeta district the next day that the State government had no right to take any decision on the process of updating the NRC. The Chief Minister too clarified in Guwahati on Thursday that the two pilot projects of updating the NRC at Barpeta and Chhaygaon had been temporarily suspended and would be taken up again. He added that the people had waited eagerly for the updating of the 1951 NRC since 1952 and could certainly take a further delay of 10 or 15 days in their stride. This statement is obviously incorrect on two counts. In the first place, why should people start waiting for the revision of the 1951 NRC from the very following year? Secondly, we should know from experience that the delay of 10 or 15 days is just a verbal mannerism. When the government says 10 or 15 days, it generally means a few months. Could the Chief Minister be implying that the updating of the NRC could be delayed beyond the Assembly elections of 2011? This would be a totally intolerable proposition. What is more, the Chief Minister has to live down the allegation that Wednesday�s explosive violence leading to four deaths and several injuries was, in fact, a conspiracy of the government and the AAMSU to bury the updating of the NRC that would at least lead to the disfranchisement of several thousand illegal voters even if it failed to achieve anything else. But the Congress, that is looking forward to a hat trick of sorts cannot afford to face the coming Assembly elections with stained hands. http://www.sentinelassam.com/mainnews/story.php?sec=1&subsec=0&id=42618&dtP=2010-07-25&ppr=1#42618
