Creating the non-citizen: Intricacies of the proposed NPR and NRC exercises

A welcome collation of essays and memoirs explores the intricacies of the proposed NPR and NRC exercises and their implications for the Indian republic

“This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California to the New York Island/ From the redwood forest to the  Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me”

The invitation to inclusion and egalitarianism sung by Woody Guthrie could have prompted this book’s name. It was a poem by “Bengali-origin Assamese poet, Kazi Neel” that actually inspired it. Possibly riffing after Guthrie, Neel says, “This land is mine, I am not of this land”. The poignancy of it is tinged by a passage in the book that says, “[H]e loves India, but India refuses to own him”.

The book explores at length what it calls the “manufacture of stateles­s­ness” or, to modify another phrase from these pages, the removal of the right to have most rights. To this end, we get an impressive collation of articles by well-respected acad­e­mics, journalists, and writers, devel­oping a clutch of themes including the legalised traps in which people would be disenfranchised through the National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citi­zens (NRC), and the implica­tions of these for the Indian republic; the disasters the NRC in Assam has wro­ught; the mass agitations against a pan-India NRC, their implications; and more. What results is a tome worthy of any bookshelf for a specialist audience — such as academics, legal experts or scholars, activists, and students.

Many articles provide a wel­come, thorough explanation on The Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), the first piece of the puzzle, which provided fast-tracking for non-Muslim migrants arriving in India from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but excluded Muslims. This law changed the nature of Ind­ian citizenship, and we get an illum­i­nating discussion on the idea of citi­zenship. Niraja Gopal Jayal writes of “a foun­d­ational shift in the conception of the Ind­ian citizen embodied in the Constitution of India... a move from... a jus soli or birth-based principle of citizen­ship in the direction of a jus sanguinis or des­cent-based principle; and second, a shift from a religion-neutral law to a law that differentiates based on religious identity”.

We are told how, by proposing a NPR and then an NRC, both of which, speaking metaphorically, will be written with saffron ink, the Indian government led by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah pro­p­oses to persecute hun­dreds of thousands of people. Most of them, according to an article by Mihika Chanchani, will likely be Muslims and also other margin­alised people — “Adiv­asis, Dalits, women, sexual minorities, persons with disabi­lities, etc...” along with “... persons with men­tal illness, and potent­ially millions of others who are uneducated and lack the resources to acquire such a vast range of documents” proving Indian citizenship.

The NRC exercise would (to cherry-pick from Mohsin Alam Bhat’s article) whip up false “paranoia of for­e­igners taking over the country”. The NPR would be a household survey to find out who is a “usual resident” of the country, and would precede the NRC, a cat­alogue of biometric and other per­sonal information that can create a surveillance state under which one is a suspect all the time. Bhat’s art­icle explores among other things how the NPR-NRC process is used to advance the Sangh’s age­n­da of, to put it mildly, hatred. The articles by multiple writers work together to peel away the rh­e­toric and legalese to lay bare the muscles and claws of brutality.

The book dwells at length on the exi­sting NRC in Assam, which dec­lared that 19,00,000 people were non-citizens. Many are locked up, with fewer rights than criminals get and no chance of bail, either, in euphe­mistically-named “detention cent­res”. We read real-life stories of how many prisoners sickened and died or are dying. To quote Mohsin Alam Bhat: “[T]housands have been declared foreigners in ex parte proceedings — without their pre­sence in the Tri­bunals. Many dec­lared foreigners have complained that they never received notices... Daily wage workers could not risk missing a precious day’s remuneration. Many others could not afford lawyers to represent them.”

Among the writers are people in Assam personally affected by the NRC. So Abdul Kalam Azad writes of the physical and psy­c­hological violence he faced at the hands of Hindus, which int­ern­a­l­ised his dis-ease with his identity. He says, “Swallowing abuse and humiliation has made me resili­ent. I have learnt how to live like a second-grade Axomiya. I only wonder how to prepare my three-year-old son.” We also get an insightful look at the histo­ri­cal, cultural disquiet that produ­ced the demand for an NRC in Assam.

The exploration of the Assam NRC helps us to see what a pan-India NRC could look like. This, as Harsh Mander writes, will “[throw] 200 million Indian Muslim people into the perpetual hell of fear, uncertainty and absolute helplessness... this will mean the end of India as we know it, as a democracy, a civilization”. And, in another article, Nizam Pasha writes how the NRC process “is eerily reminiscent” of the Nazi “Nuremberg Laws” which enabled the Holocaust.

Most of the quotes here are from the more general, intro­d­u­ctory parts of the book, and to of­fer a glimpse of the depths of the book is to stray beyond the clic­héd phrase, “sweeping in scope”. Enough depth and width are on offer here. Hawk’s-eye views and hare’s-eye-views and others in between combine to traverse political, legal, cultural, and other dire straits stifling the people who’re declared non-citizens.

Given the academic bent of the book, its language tends to be technical and its intricate prose is meant for folks with some domain expertise. We get a map of the CAA-NRC labyrinth down to the smallest corner, which entails repeat surveys and re-tracing of tracks, measuring our steps, absorbing mindfully, and generally taking our time. This book requires the reader to live with it for a while to wield the thinking tools needed to see through CAA-NRC, and to legally mobilise opposition against it. I suppose the book will fortify one’s emotional, peaceful resistance with a logical, historical and cultural perspective — provided one perseveres with it.

The ideal single reader for this book has the sort of mind that engages with intricate academic texts, and a heart that warms with compassion to poems and accounts of real life, which are also included. That reader is a sapiosexual’s pin-up.