Citizen’s activism through the Right to Information Act (RTI) has revealed how, a giant step towards NPR and NRC was taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) when the information contained in the Aadhaar database was linked with the NPR database in 2015. While the only legal way of linking the two databases is by acquiring informed consent from every resident through a public exercise similar to the Census, which means through a public exercise conducted by the Registrar General of India (RGI), investigations reveal that the exercise did not have any provision to collect any informed consent for this linkage. This presentation below, exclusively available on CJP reveals that this apparently illegal action makes the NPR an even greater threat to the common people than what was previously thought. The involved citizens in and around Metiabruz Kolkata are close collaborators with Citizens for Justice and Peace (cjp.org.in)
The nationwide movement against the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was triggered by passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), came to an abrupt halt in 2020 after the outbreak of Covid-19, the subsequent lockdown imposed by the government and the repression unleashed by the Delhi and UP police on the young leadership that was protesting the issue. CJP had taken the lead then as among the main civil and legal rights organisation to create public advocacy and awareness of the dangers of the provisions of the 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Rules (Indian Citizenship Act, 2003) that present the danger of bureaucratic profiling and exclusion of large sections of the Indian citizenry, especially unlettered and marginalized Indians. CJP’s experience of working over 6 years in Assam (since 2017) has ensured a deep, nuanced and thorough knowledge of how the on-ground implications of a bureaucracy driven documentary “test” for citizens means denial of citizenship rights, alienation of all rights to exist in terms of access to institutions and welfare schemes, impoverishment and physical and mental discriminations.
Today, 2024
The vibrant call of the nationwide movement was Kagaj Nehi Dikhayenge, i.e., we shall not show any document had gathered momentum and was thus silenced. CJP’s investigation has shown how, the government has already started a process of NPR-NRC via an indirect another route which required no documentary evidence from the citizens.
After the passing of the pandemic, a group in Metiabruz, a part of Kolkata district of West Bengal, close collaborators with CJP, re-started their endeavour to build up an agitation to resist NPR-NRC-CAA. They opposed all amendments of the Citizenship Act 1955, which vitiated our constitutional right to citizenship by birth. In 2023 they were surprised to discover that the Annual Report 2021-22 of MHA declared (in section 15.41 of NPR) that
“In 2015, a few fields such as Name, Gender, Date and Place of Birth, Place of Residence and Father’s and Mother’s name were updated and Aadhaar, Mobile and Ration Card Numbers were collected”. But neither did they witness any such exercise being carried out in their locality from the Registrar General of India (RGI), nor did any enumerator come to them for updating NPR and for collecting Aadhaar Number in 2015-16. So, this event led them to file a series of RTIs, First Appeals and Second Appeals to the concerned government authorities to verify the legitimacy of the NPR process starting from 2010.”
Connecting the dots of publicly available information with the information obtained through RTI brings out a compelling and frightening story.
It appears that a giant step towards NPR and NRC was taken quietly when information belonging to the Aadhaar database was linked with the NPR database. The only legal way of linking the two databases is by acquiring informed consent from every resident through an exercise similar to the Census. That exercise would have surely evoked public outrage similar to what had been witnessed at the time of the passing of CAA/CAB. However, it seems from the replies to the series of RTI queries that the linking was done without any informed consent. This apparently illegal action makes the NPR an even greater threat to the common people than what was previously thought.
These developments pose a clear and present danger of no less magnitude than what triggered the CAA- NPR-NRC movement, though there is no conspicuous symbol of that danger visible to the public. Citizens have to come together and prevent governmental overreach and harassment of the people.
This article was originally published on the Citizens for Justice and Peace website.