(Illustration: Saurabh Singh)
AFTER YEARS OF DELAY, the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) may finally be operationalised soon. While the law was passed by Parliament in December 2019 and received the president’s assent soon after, implementing the law required the framing of rules under the Act. This remained pending ever since and the government sought multiple extensions of deadlines from Parliament to frame the rules. That process is now close to an end. There are ample hints to that effect.
At a meeting of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers in Kolkata
on December 26, 2023, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said there was no doubt that CAA was the law of the land. He said, “I want to say this clearly that CAA is the law of the land and no one can stop its implementation. This is the commitment of our party.”
The law was enacted to give justice to religious minorities who have been persecuted for long in India’s neighbouring countries. These include Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who had entered India by December 31, 2014.
The exclusion of Muslims had led to a furore in the opposition camp that said the exclusion of Muslims was a violation of India’s secular credentials and was thus unconstitutional. It is another matter that when it comes to granting citizenship—or the stage prior to conferring it, when the applicant is clearly not an Indian citizen—the government is not obliged to be ‘secular’. The countries in question—with the exception of Bangladesh—were explicitly founded along religious lines and the fate of minorities in these countries is well known to everyone except those who argue along ‘secular’ lines. Even in the case of Bangladesh, which is formally a secular republic, the Hindu minority is imperilled and has nowhere to go.
Hindus and other religious communities who fled from these countries to India often are unable to get citizenship as the normal process for acquiring citizenship is cumbersome. CAA enables fast-tracking for this category of applicants.
In the wake of the law being passed in 2019, there were massive protests by Muslims across northern India. These agitations—often violent—were launched even after Shah had assured on the floor of Parliament that Muslim citizens would have nothing to worry about: their citizenship would not be affected. But that was to no avail. The Shaheen Bagh protest and the riots in Delhi in early 2020 were directly due to opposition to CAA.
These protests and violence by people whose citizenship is least likely to be affected were perplexing at the time. But when viewed from the perspective of changing demographics in some of India’s most ‘difficult’ border states and regions, the opposition to CAA becomes obvious. Over a period of time, India’s eastern states have witnessed massive influx of non-citizens from Bangladesh. Muslims form a majority of these illegal immigrants. In Assam, Bengali Hindu immigrants, too, are a significant proportion of the migrant population. This has led to a major shift in the state’s demographic profile over time and has caused a political upheaval.
In this context, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the other side of the equilibrating equation. Unless a thorough-going NRC that clearly delineates citizens from non-citizens is put in place, illegal immigration will continue to pose serious political and security challenges in India. In Assam in particular, the last NRC exercise was unsatisfactory given the sheer number of non-citizens who managed to evade the identification dragnet.
Even if all non-citizens were identified, the question of what to do with this population would remain. It is quixotic to think that these individuals could be repatriated to their country of origin. The only feasible option would be to ensure that this mass did not enjoy political rights at par with citizens even if it remained within India.
This is where India’s opposition parties have dug in their heels. They do not want such an identification exercise to begin with. This has taken various hues. At one level it is claimed that the number of illegal immigrants is vastly overstated. Another dubious claim until recently was that Bangladesh was growing at a fast pace and hence there was no economic logic to migration. Some leftist commentators went so far as to say that reverse migration from India to Bangladesh was more likely. There is no end to such dubious claims.
When viewed from the changing demographics in the most ‘difficult’ border regions, the opposition to CAA is obvious. India’s eastern states have a massive influx of non-citizens from Bangladesh. Muslims form a majority of these immigrants. In Assam, Bengali Hindu immigrants, are a significant proportion of the migrant population
The reality is that Bangladesh is a ‘land-stressed’ country and the search for land, particularly in the north-eastern states has led to mass illegal immigration. In this context, it is interesting to note that the 2019 Act (Section 3, sub-section 6B(4)) specifically bars its application to the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura. The problem area is the plains and riverine areas of Assam where the demographic composition has changed beyond recognition. The remedy required here is NRC.
At a broader level of argumentation it is claimed that any reinvigorated sense of nationalism—particularly the sorting of non-citizens from citizens—runs counter to the tenets of liberalism. This is true. But the choice before a complex country like India in that case is to either preserve its sense of nationhood or to silently undergo demographic changes that over time will erode the basis of its identity and culture.
In this context, India is not alone. From the banks of Helge in Sweden to the Danubian frontier in Central Europe and from the English Channel all the way to the Ganges Delta, these changes have resulted in a severe backlash. Even the New World is not immune from the problem. The mass immigration from Mesoamerica to the US—a modern day völkerwanderung—has churned the politics of that country beyond recognition.
These changes, however, have not led to a re-appreciation of the dangers inherent in mass illegal migration nor of the fate of minorities in countries with official religions. If anything, the alleged protection of liberties required this trend to be encouraged further. The ‘safety of liberalism’ is ranked higher than the safety of nation-states. A more perverted version of politics is yet to be discovered in the 21st century.
In India, the cognate of this politics is the stress on ‘federalism’. The idea is simple: dispersion of power from the central, sovereign, authority to smaller jurisdictions and away from the so-called majority—Hindus in India—to minorities holding a veto was said to be a solution to the problem of individual liberties. But the question of liberty for whom and to what end is left unanswered. Predictably, it has led to a backlash.
The answer here is not to engender authoritarian forms of government but to understand what fuels the alleged move towards authoritarianism. But even that is left unaddressed. It is like ordering change along the lines of what critics of centralisation want but without understanding the processes that led to a reinvigorated centralisation and nationalism.
Anyway, these rarefied ideas are a far remove from the practical realities of administering India and ensuring that peace, stability, and economic development proceed unhindered. Once CAA is operationalised, one part of the solution will kick in. Hopefully, a foolproof NRC will be an item on the government’s list of priorities as well.
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