[(This is in continuation with 'The NRC Conundrum (or Quagmire?): Home Minister (now) Claims the (nationwide) NRC would cover Assam!!! Assam Government rejects SC mandated NRC?' at < https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/greenyouth/eovCP4_6zwo>. For a short discussion on the drivers behind the move, please look up.)
"The NRC exercise in Assam was undertaken as per an order of the Supreme Court and as per a separate Act. When the NRC exercise is replicated across the country, it will naturally have to be repeated in Assam. ..." (That's what the Home Minister Amit Shah, reportedly, said in the Rajya Sabha yesterday, 20 11 2019. Ref.: < https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/pan-india-nrc-will-mean-repeat-in-assam-amit-shah/1770820/ >.) Though it does not explicitly state, it very well implies that if the nationwide NRC is to cover Assam as well, the parameters to determine citizenship will have to be uniform all across India, including Assam. That's *not* the case, right at the moment. The detailed comment at sl. no. II. below, deals with the specific implications of and hurdles involved. Regardless of the periodic hysteric screams against the "termites" emanating from the incumbent Home Minister and his gang memebers. The IE edit is a brief, yet reasoned and forceful, appeal for sanity. Assam’s NRC was updated according to the provisions of the Assam Accord – an agreement that Assamese nationalists signed in 1985 with the Union government to end of their six-year-long anti-foreigner movement in the state. The Constitution was amended to account for the Accord. Assam was to have its own special citizenship rule according to which the cut-off date for Indian citizenship in the state was set as March 24, 1971. Simply put: anyone who migrated before that would be an Indian citizen in Assam. The corresponding date for the rest of the country is July 19, 1948. Apart from the obvious concerns about cost and hardship, Shah’s clarification and Sarma’s subsequent statement have stirred the citizenship pot in Assam yet again and raised several questions. (Excerpted from sl. no. II. below.) The NRC is a flawed idea and its limitations have been exposed in Assam. The exercise also bared the futility of pursuing a project of establishing identity through legacy in a country that has seen massive migrations, forced and voluntary. Shah and others must abandon their obsession, which, with its communal overtones, can only result in stoking new fears and anxieties. (Excerpted from sl. no. I. below.) The incumbent regime is, however, anything but sane.] I/II. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/assam-nrc-amit-shah-bjp-6130925/?fbclid=IwAR2ZrTLs4bfMyIXmoVKIwWz3ySFVbwtHkGjNJb5slTWDG_zhoT8a1KN9w30 No more NRC Home Minister Shah’s ambition of renewing it in Assam, extending it to country, is flawed and divisive Published: November 22, 2019 3:15:55 am Shah and others must abandon their obsession, which, with its communal overtones, can only result in stoking new fears and anxieties. The updated National Register of Citizens, a four-year-long exercise monitored by the Supreme Court, costing Rs 1,600 crore, appears to have been relegated for all practical purposes. Union Home Minister Amit Shah told Parliament on Wednesday that the exercise will be undertaken across the country soon, including — afresh — in Assam. The updated Assam NRC, published on August 31, left 19 lakh people stateless and exposed to the prospect of being lodged in detention camps after exhausting appeals against their exclusion from the Register. The exercise turned the Northeast restive. With reports suggesting that a large part of those excluded are Hindus, the BJP rejected the Register, even after the Supreme Court endorsed it. By all accounts, the NRC in Assam has been a failure: It did not satisfy any section of the society, reopened faultlines of religion, language and ethnicity, and left millions of people on the edge. It is appalling that the government now wants to impose this divisive and tortuous exercise on the rest of the country. Advertising Shah has been infatuated with the idea of the NRC for some time; he has threatened a nation-wide NRC in his election campaigns. Clearly, the BJP top brass seems ignorant of the history of the NRC, which was proposed in 1951 in the specific context of Assam witnessing a major demographic upheaval in the wake of Partition. The 1985 Assam Accord, signed between the Rajiv Gandhi government and the major players of the Assam Movement, gave it a new life. The Supreme Court directed the state government in 2013 to execute it and began monitoring it from December 2015. The point is that the NRC was a demand made by the state’s political leadership to address concerns specific to it. It was the product of a political imagination that privileged ethno-linguistic identity over more inclusive ideas of citizenship and rejected the notion that societies are shaped by the movement of people and capital. This resentful politics, centered on the fear of the Outsider, not surprisingly, resulted in violence and gave birth to an armed insurgency. The past few years have seen Assam emerge from this morass of violence and rebuild its economy. But the NRC, and its byproduct, the Citizenship Amendment Bill, have threatened a regression into a past that saw one section of society pitted against the other. The NRC is a flawed idea and its limitations have been exposed in Assam. The exercise also bared the futility of pursuing a project of establishing identity through legacy in a country that has seen massive migrations, forced and voluntary. Shah and others must abandon their obsession, which, with its communal overtones, can only result in stoking new fears and anxieties. II. https://scroll.in/article/944460/why-amit-shahs-promise-to-extend-a-pan-india-nrc-to-assam-will-not-be-easy CITIZENSHIP TANGLE Why Amit Shah’s promise to extend a pan-India NRC to Assam will not be easy Anyone who migrated before March 24, 1971, would be an Indian citizen in Assam. The corresponding date for the rest of the country is July 19, 1948. Why Amit Shah’s promise to extend a pan-India NRC to Assam will not be easy Muslim men display their National Register of Citizens forms. | PTI 4 hours ago Arunabh Saikia On November 20, Home Minister Amit Shah reiterated in Parliament that the government intended to prepare a countrywide National Register of Citizen. Responding to a query, he added that it was only “natural” that the exercise would be also be carried out afresh in Assam where the NRC update process came to a close less than three months ago. In Assam, the only state to have a prior NRC compiled in 1951, the update exercise took over four years and reportedly cost the state exchequer Rs 1,600 crore. The NRC is meant to separate undocumented migrants from genuine citizens. One country, one cut-off? Shah’s statement was followed by a news conference in Guwahati by Himanta Biswa Sarma, a cabinet minister in the Assam’s Bharatiya Janata Party government. Sarma said that the state government favoured one composite national NRC with a uniform cut-off year for the entire country. Assam’s NRC was updated according to the provisions of the Assam Accord – an agreement that Assamese nationalists signed in 1985 with the Union government to end of their six-year-long anti-foreigner movement in the state. The Constitution was amended to account for the Accord. Assam was to have its own special citizenship rule according to which the cut-off date for Indian citizenship in the state was set as March 24, 1971. Simply put: anyone who migrated before that would be an Indian citizen in Assam. The corresponding date for the rest of the country is July 19, 1948. Apart from the obvious concerns about cost and hardship, Shah’s clarification and Sarma’s subsequent statement have stirred the citizenship pot in Assam yet again and raised several questions. The peculiar case of Assam The most important pertains to the uniform cut-off that Sarma referred to. “If the cut-off year is 1971, then it should be the same for all states,” he said. But it is unlikely that will be the case since the 1971 cut-off flows from a special Assam-specific clause of the Constitution. Conversely, the 1948 cut-off comes with its own set of problems in Assam. “That would mean you have to repeal the 1971 provision first,” said Santanu Borthakur, a Guwahati-based lawyer. That, Borthakur said, was easier said than done. People stand in a queue to check their names on the final list of the National Register of Citizens in an office in Pavakati village of Morigoan district of Assam. Credit: AFP “Right or wrong, you have granted citizenship to people who came till 1971 to via that amendment,” he said. “To invoke their citizenship now is no mean task, you have to send individual notices to lakhs of people and give them a chance to put their case forward.” A petition challenging the constitutionality of the Assam Accord is currently pending in the Supreme Court. Borthakur said even if the court struck down the Accord, it was likely to provide some sort of amnesty to the people who had been granted citizenship under it. Citizenship by birth While many hardline Assamese nationalist organisations argue in favour of a 1948 cut-off mirroring the rest of the country, a closer scrutiny of the fine-print of India’s citizenship laws may convince them otherwise. As lawyer Mustafa Khaddam Hussain pointed out: “A pan-India law would mean that everyone born in India till 1987 would be an Indian citizen.” This is because India’s citizenship law grants direct citizenship to people born in the country between January 26, 1950 and July 1, 1987, except in the case of Assam where people born in the state between 1971 and 2004 have to establish their “linkage” with a pre-1971 ancestor on either their mother or father’s side. The NRC was updated following the same principle. “One must remember,” Hussain said, “that for the purpose of the NRC in Assam, only citizenship by descent was considered. Other modes such as citizenship by birth and registration were not allowed.” That, Hussain said, would not be the case in the rest of India. Borthakur agreed, saying that a pan-India cut off could actually be counter-productive from the Assamese nationalist point of view. Legal provision The All Assam Students’ Union, one of the signatories of the Assam Accord, however, seemed to have no objections to the Centre’s plans to initiate a fresh process in the entire country including in Assam. “There is already a legal provision for an all-India NRC,” said Samujjal Bhattacharya, adviser to the outfit. “For Assam, though, it must be based on Assam Accord and done under the Supreme Court’s supervision.” The legal provision Bhattacharya refers to flows from the Citizenship Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules of 2003. But yet again, the NRC envisaged by these rules stand at odds with how the process played out in Assam. For instance, the 2003 rules define National Register of Indian Citizens as a “register containing details of Indian Citizens living in India and outside India”. To create that database, the rules say that the Central government would “cause to carry throughout the country a house-to-house enumeration for collection of specified particulars relating to each family and individual, residing in a local area including the Citizenship status”. Special rules for Assam In 2009, an Assam-specific amendment to these rules, however, replaced the “house-to-house enumeration” with “invitation and receipt of applications from all citizens”. Effectively, it put the burden of proof of citizenship on the residents of Assam whereas in the rest of the country the rules require the authorities to do their own verification first before demanding proof of the “doubtful” resident. Queue to check for inclusion of names in the citizens register. Credit: Reuters In line with these rules, the Centre put out a notification in August to prepare a National Population Register that was to serve as a base document for the NRC. Assam was exempted from the exercise as it was already in the middle of updating its NRC. NRC for Muslims? When the final Assam NRC came out on August 31, it impressed few in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ecosystem. Complaints abounded about too many Hindus being left out. The state unit of the BJP went to the extent of rejecting it – Sarma repeated that sentiment on Wednesday. The new pan-India NRC would be rectifying the errors, he seemed to suggest. This, in addition to the Shah’s promise to pass the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that seeks to facilitate citizenship to undocumented non-Muslim migrants, before embarking on the NRC project. In other words, the new NRC as envisioned by Shah may just make undocumented migrants out of Muslims. But Bengali Hindu groups in Assam are not convinced yet. “This [another NRC with a backdated cut-off] seems to be a ploy by the BJP to hold us hostage by making us foreigners first so that we are grateful to them for rescuing us through the Citizenship Bill,” said Kamal Choudhury of Assam Bengali Youth Students’ Federation, But, Chaudhury asked, “What about the harassment of going through the process itself all over again?” -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/greenyouth/CACEsOZjBZ_MqnWKQxayXqc85b7u9kwA_eFk64%3DPEAHFyaYNgQg%40mail.gmail.com.
