Don't repeat the mistake

Politicians'calls for NRCs in their states are irresponsible

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has reportedly said that his state will implement the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the controversial exercise that attempts to enumerate and record all Indian citizens in a state by asking them to submit paperwork demonstrating their, or their forebears’, presence within Indian territory prior to a particular cut-off date. Mr Khattar’s statement appears to have bipartisan support in Haryana; his predecessor, Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress, also said it was the responsibility of the government to identify non-citizens. Haryana, which includes the prosperous Delhi suburb of Gurugram, has been riven for years with unsubstantiated claims about mass Bangladeshi immigration, and there is much political fodder to be made from an NRC-like process. Indeed, even the chief minister of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, has said that the NRC can be started in UP phase-wise, because it is “important for national security and will also put a stop to the rights of the poor being taken away by illegal immigration”.

What is odd about this rush by politicians to call for the replication of the Assam NRC process elsewhere in India is that the failures and gaps in how the NRC has been prepared have become glaringly evident over the past weeks. Even the Assam BJP is far from happy with the end result, in which 1.9 million people have been left at risk of statelessness. They believe that too many Muslims have been included in the list of citizens and that too many Hindus have been excluded. The problems of gathering paperwork to demonstrate antecedents in India have also become widely known. Given these problems, it is hard to see how any objective case can be made for replicating such a flawed process elsewhere. It is also important to note that Assam is after all a special case. The NRC process in Assam arose not from a vacuum but from an official accord signed by the Government of India in the 1980s, which committed it to enumerating citizens in Assam. It is also valid to note that the Assam Accord created a citizenship cut-off of 1971, two decades after the cut-off for the rest of the country. Extending the NRC to the rest of India thus will be legally and practically even more complicated. Further, there will be a limited pay-off in terms of identifying illegal immigrants if the NRC Assam is any guide — the exaggerated numbers thrown around for years about “infiltration” were not reflected in the final NRC. Politicians should refrain from scoring political points about something so disruptive and socially problematic. 

Questions also need to be asked now about what happens to the 1.9 million identified in Assam as possible non-citizens. Foreigner tribunals — another Assam-specific institution, which are not available as appellate bodies in the rest of the country — are worryingly biased. If a significant proportion of the people are eventually declared non-citizens following legal appeals, then India has the responsibility of dealing with these stateless people — since Bangladesh is certainly not going to take them back. Reports that giant detention camps are being built do not provide much comfort. Such camps cannot be a permanent solution; they will be a humanitarian and economic disaster. Legal re-integration of the stateless into the economy and society, together with a path to citizenship for their children, must be a priority.