New Delhi: The birth register will now mention a child’s father’s and mother’s religions according to Model Rules drafted by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, The Hindu has reported.
Earlier, only the family’s religion was recorded.
The proposed ‘Form No.1-Birth Report’ will expand on the earlier format, requiring the child’s religion to also accompany the religion of the child’s father and mother.
The Model Rules will need to be adopted and notified by state governments before they are implemented, the report notes.
The Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, was passed by the parliament on August 11 last year.
The Wire had noted how the home ministry is proposing to make Aadhaar mandatory to track new births and deaths in any family with the help of these amendments. “It is proposing to build a database of births and deaths and use it to update every other database in the government, from the National Population Register, to voter rolls, and the databases of ration card, passport, driving licence and Aadhaar,” Srinivas Kodali had written.
The Hindu’s report noted that the birth register form pertaining to legal information (there is another, for statistical information) has been expanded to record the Aadhaar number, and the mobile and e-mail IDs of both the parents, if available. The address box has been made more descriptive, it says.
The “informant” providing the information will also have to provide their Aadhaar and contact details.
The court said a child of an unwed mother is also a citizen of this country, adding that their fundamental rights of privacy, dignity and liberty cannot be curtailed by any authority.
New Delhi: The Kerala high court has allowed a person to include his mother’s name alone in the birth certificate, identity certificates and other documents.
Justice P.V. Kunhikrishnan, in an order issued on July 19, said a child of an unwed mother is also a citizen of this country and nobody can infringe any of his/her fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution.
“It is clear that it is the right of a person to include his mother’s name alone in the birth certificate, identity certificates and other documents. As I observed earlier, there are children of rape victims and children of unwed mothers in this country. Their right of privacy, dignity and liberty cannot be curtailed by any authority,” the judgment said, reported Bar and Bench.
The court made these observations while hearing a plea of a petitioner whose father’s name was different in three of his documents. The petitioner is the son of an unwed mother.
According to the report, the mother of the petitioner was only a minor when she was impregnated under mysterious circumstances by an unidentified person.
The court, therefore, directed the Registrar of Births and Deaths to expunge and remove the name of the petitioner’s father from the birth register maintained at the office and issue a certificate showing the name of mother only as a single parent.
The court referred to the provisions of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 and the Kerala Registration of Births and Deaths Rules, 1999 to make any corrections in documents.
The court also said the state should protect citizens of all kind as equal to other citizens without disclosing their identity and privacy. “Otherwise, they will face unimaginable mental agonies,” it said.
It also cited a letter issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs in which the apex court had directed all chief registrars of births and deaths to follow the directions of the Supreme Court that in case of single/unwed mother, birth certificates may be issued after producing an affidavit, and without insisting on the identity of the father.
In 2015, the Supreme Court had directed municipal bodies to not insist on the name of the father while issuing birth certificate for children born outside wedlock. The apex court had said that in such cases the birth certificate should mention only the mother’s name.
The court had also directed the general education department, the board of higher secondary examinations, the UIDAI, the IT department, the passport officer, the Election Commission of India and the State Election Commission to effect the consequential expunge of the name of the father from their official records and databases.
S. Venkatesan, MP from Madurai, writes about a letter he received on his birthday and what it reveals about the apprehensions people have about the CAA and NPR.
The following is a translation of a Facebook post by Madurai MP S. Venkatesan. Translated from Tamil by Kavitha Muralidharan.
I was flooded with greetings from friends, comrades and readers for my birthday yesterday (March 16). I express my gratitude to everyone.
As Member of Parliament, I had also received the greetings from the honourable president and prime minister. I extend my warm gratitude to them.
Comrades at my MP office handed over a letter yesterday from a Mariam Beevi of Tiruchy. It was a letter written for some work that I had done as a Member of Parliament. The words in the letter are not something that I could easily get over. The letter carried love and overwhelming gratitude, for rescuing her from a particularly painful experience.
I received the greeting from the prime minister when I was reading Beevi’s letter. Both were written to me in my capacity as Member of Parliament.
In front of my eyes, there were words from the prime minister on one side and from Mariam Beevi on the other.
Beevi was struggling for over two years to get her birth certificate from the Madurai Municipal Corporation. From Tiruchy, she had travelled countless times to Madurai – 150 kilometres away – to secure her birth certificate. The corporation officials keep dodging her request, giving her a different excuse each time. She saw a poster announcing my participation at an anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protest in Tiruchy and decided to meet me in person, to handover a memorandum on getting her certificate. I couldn’t go to the protest. A comrade had asked an exhausted Mariam Beevi to send the memorandum by post. She half-heartedly did it.
On seeing the letter in my office, I wrote to the corporation officials in Madurai, after which action was taken. Mariam Beevi was contacted over phone, asked to come in person and had her birth certificate handed over to her. Her letter yesterday was to thank me for this act.
Honourable prime minister, a woman has to run pillar to post for two years to get her birth certificate. And she still couldn’t. She brings it to the notice of the MP and only after his intervention, she gets the certificate.
In her letter, an emotional Beevi writes that for as long as she lives, she will never forget the act of the MP in getting her the certificate. I could see the tears welling up her eyes, as she added that she would pray for my well-being and welfare. Every word, I know, carries the pain of her two-year struggle to get the certificate. The pain and the suffering led her to believe that my simple act is rather extraordinary. In return, she wants God to take care of me.
My dear prime minister, I have not done anything great to deserve the prayer of a woman I have not seen, for my well-being and good life. I merely forwarded a letter that my office had received to the municipal corporation. If people are expressing overwhelming gratitude for this small act, how strong could be the walls that prevent them from getting this work done?
Honourable prime minister, we have countless Mariam Beevis and Mariammas facing endless struggles to get their own birth certificates. But you have been asking them to get the birth certificates of their parents too.
Honourable prime minister, you have said in your greeting, that let my rich and varied experiences help the growth of this country. I write to you on account of the truth in the greeting: Please withdraw the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Please drop the National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercises. If you do that, there are countless ordinary people who will pray for your welfare and well-being. It will be a great step towards the real development of this country.
In the period we live in, the positions we occupy have their own meanings. We must use them to work to remove the sufferings of the people and to make this country a blessed land for them. The greetings I had received on my birthday had helped reaffirm this belief of mine and to further myself towards this goal.
I thank you again for your greetings.
Best
S. Venkatesan
Member of Parliament
Madurai
CPI(M)
Do sex markers on birth certificates take away the freedom of self determination and become bases for discrimination?
Do sex markers on birth certificates take away the freedom of self determination and become bases for discrimination?
Credit: Aeon
By the 20th week into a pregnancy, an ultrasound scan can be used to determine a baby’s sex and parents are given the option of learning this information, or waiting to hear ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’ At birth, the delivering physician or midwife visually confirms and records the previewed sex identity on a birth certificate application form. Our governments have some good reasons for collecting and keeping sex identity information about us in the aggregate for the purposes of demographic studies, public health and affirmative-action measures. But the sex markers on state-issued birth certificates are not necessary for these goals. In fact, a government has no business collecting information about our personal sex identities at birth, or keeping track of the decisions we might make about our sex identities over the course of our lifetimes.
To protect the right of gender self-determination, we should remove sex markers from birth certificates before they become the basis for sex discrimination. Consider North Carolina’s 2016 ‘bathroom bill’, which required people to use the restroom that matched their ‘biological sex’ – the one noted on a birth certificate – in public schools and state agencies. Defenders of this and other ‘bathroom bills’ cite privacy and safety concerns that are tied to the false stereotype that transgender women are really heterosexual men who don dresses to enter female-designated public restrooms, and sexually assault girls and women. Critics of the law see it as state-sponsored gender identity discrimination.
Getting rid of sex markers on birth certificates is rooted in the liberal philosophical concept of self-determination and, in particular, the precept that the state should not restrict our free expression and speech.
We are partway there. The majority of US states permits transgender people to change the sex marker on their birth certificate. The transgender civil rights movement has long focused on assimilating and accommodating transgender people within the existing sex binary of male or female. These reforms help some transgender people, but not everyone can or wishes to be defined by these norms. Assimilation and accommodation leave intact the primary source of sex-identity discrimination: bureaucratic sex-classification itself.
The policy reform of allowing transgender people to ‘correct’ the sex markers on birth certificates also doesn’t guarantee its enforcement. Stephanie Mott’s story is a case in point. Mott, a transgender woman, is suing the state of Kansas for failing to enforce a law that explicitly allows transgender people to change the sex markers on their birth certificates. ‘I shouldn’t have to out myself as transgender every time I apply for a job or when I register to vote,’ Mott said.
The act of correction is also problematic because it implies some sort of mistake. In his beautiful memoir What Becomes You (2008), co-written with his mother Hilda Raz, Aaron Raz Link, a self-described white female-to-male transsexual, historian of science and professional clown, challenges the persistent stereotype that transgender people are ‘trapped in the wrong body’, and acquire a ‘new body’ via surgery and hormones. He begins the story of his transition with the inevitable mutability of all human bodies over time:
Like everyone else, I have had the same body since the day I was born. Approximately every seven years, most of my cells, like yours, have been replaced by new cells. I am trapped within my body only as little and as much as every other human being. To believe otherwise is to deny a miracle; I have changed and there is only one of me.
For Link, who does not speak for all transgender people, the idea of correction rings false.
Another approach to transgender inclusion is to add more sex-identity categories beyond male and female. In 2013, Australia passed legislation that added a third sex marker option of ‘X’ in addition to ‘M’ or ‘F’ to its passports. According to Australian law, X represents ‘indeterminate, intersex (born with anatomy for both sexes) or unspecified’ and is available only to those born with intersex conditions or transgender Australians who can produce a ‘letter of support’ from a physician. Bangladesh added a similar third sex-marker option of ‘other’ to its passports in 2013, and India passed legislation in 2005 that added a third sex marker option of ‘E’, which stands for eunuch. In 2013, Germany gave intersex, but not transgender, adults the third option of ‘X’ on both their passports and their birth certificates. Germany’s law also gives the parents of intersex infants the option of leaving the sex designation on their children’s birth certificate blank.
Credit: Eric Rayner/Flickr
Some might embrace a third sex-marker option, but others could feel stigmatised by the additive accommodation. After all, efforts to extend government sex-classification through creation of exceptional categories could end up reinforcing the binary poles of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, leaving people who identify as non-binary out in the cold.
When we are asked to check a sex-identity box on a bureaucratic form, what definition of sex is being invoked and to what end? Is sex being used as a proxy for the look and functionality of our genitals? Is it a proxy for the mix of hormones we have in our bloodstream? Is sex a proxy for the social experiences we’ve had because we are perceived as male or female? How does intersex or transgender experience affect such questioning?
The census conducted by the federal government would be a good way of capturing relevant demographic sex-identity data because it is a voluntary questionnaire that recurs every ten years. On this self-reporting form, the federal government has a plum opportunity to clearly explain to respondents what definition of sex or gender they are being asked to voluntarily disclose and why. The racial identity questions on the census have been contested and changed over time. Perhaps it is time for the government to critically assess its use of sex classification not just on birth certificates but on the census as well.
When it comes to sex-based affirmative action, I agree with the philosopher Laurie Shrage at Florida International University that ‘the state only needs to track a person’s lived sex, which can be verified by each individual’. Employers wishing to recruit and retain female employees are justifiably interested in knowing people’s current sex identity, not the sex identity they were assigned at birth based upon genital inspection. Indeed, unless a person’s genitals are directly relevant to a given job description, as in certain kinds of sex work such as pornography, then the disclosure of such information is irrelevant to hiring and promotion, and a violation of our right to privacy. These are important questions for organisations and institutions to grapple with, and to explicitly articulate as they design their recruitment, retention and administrative policies. Removing sex markers from birth certificates is a small but powerful way to force government, businesses and schools to align their sex-related administrative policies and practices with particular justifiable sex-related goals.
Written by Heath Fogg Davis, an activist, scholar and associate professor of political science at Temple University.
This article was originally published on Aeon. Read the original article here.
