citizenship

No ‘Labharthi’, Citizen Must be Seen as a Verb

No matter what one’s political persuasion is, it must worry us all that the kind of politics brandished by the current BJP regime is a dangerous precedent from the perspective of imagining citizens as a verb by systemic impoverishment of our mental and physical capabilities.

In a recent conversation with Mohan (name changed), a 22-year-old Dalit youth from Bihar, I learned that by the time he reached class 12, he had already worked in 6 different places as a migrant worker across states from Assam to Haryana.

The examination centre for his class 12 board exams was in a town 50 kms from his village. He had to relocate to the town for the duration of his exams because commuting daily for his exams meant spending 5 hours on the road. But, relocation meant incurring additional costs for food and renting a room. With no savings or financial support, two months before his exams, he migrated again to West Bengal to work as a daily wage labourer earning Rs 350 a day. With these earnings, not only did he have to sustain himself during his stint in West Bengal but he had to also save to support himself to write his board exams.

Mohan – and millions like him – serve as extraordinary examples of dogged resilience. However, his struggles spawn several haunting, uncomfortable questions. Why should certain segments of the population be disproportionately subject to a stress test of resilience? What is the role of the government in this ? What are the implications of these to citizenship at large?

By putting an individual’s well-being at the centre, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued that the government can play a pivotal role in expanding human capabilities so that each person is able to ‘be’ and ‘do’ what they value. Being well-nourished, not having to work as a child, having access to quality education, not being discriminated against and having equal access to justice are vital for this. When these conditions are not adequately met, an individual is deprived of physical and analytical capabilities to actively participate as a citizen. In India, citizenship is at least premised on having liberty of thought, worship and action, equality in status, opportunities and access to justice. When the pre-conditions among individuals owing to accidents of birth are so varied, there is extra onus on elected governments to create an enabling ecosystem ensuring that such essential ingredients of citizenship are honoured. As such, we need to understand poverty as lacking human freedoms, to engage as a citizen.

The black American writer and comedian, Baratunde Thurston, runs a podcast called ‘How to citizen’ where a citizen is reimagined as a verb instead of a noun. In such an interpretation of citizen as a verb, ‘to citizen is (a) to participate, (b) to invest in relationships (c) to understand power and (d) to value the collective.’

Such a reframing of citizenship can help us go beyond the putative, to develop more actionable barometers of enfranchisement. In other words, are citizens able to go beyond survival and engage? Being economically secure is a necessary condition for ‘doing’ citizenship and needs to be thought of as one of the inputs in a bouquet of non-negotiable basic rights for democratic engagement. Baratunde’s framing of ‘doing’ citizenship is premised on the state being able to deliver the platform for citizens to ‘be’ and ‘do’. Any political regime’s performance review must involve interrogation by its polity on whether citizens are actionable agents to ‘do’ or are being rendered passive. As a caveat, ‘doing citizenship’ must not violate the constitutional values of liberty, fraternity, dignity and equality.

Where does India stand today on all this?

On the economic front, we are experiencing damaging levels of wage stagnation and inequality. Based on an analysis of government’s National Sample Survey data from 2012 and Periodic Labour Force Survey data up to 2022-23, a report titled ‘Ten Years of NDA · A Guarantee Check’ by the civil society platform, Bahutva Karnataka, observes that 30 crore workers in India earn less than the recommended national minimum wage of Rs 375 per day.

Not just individual income, but even the entire household income of at least 1 in 3 households, nationally, is less than Rs 375 per day. In Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the household income of more than half the households are less than this while nearly half the households in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are earning less than these threshold daily wages.

A committee of experts on wages, called the Anoop Satpathy Committee, at the behest of the BJP government in 2019, had made these minimum wage recommendations using the amount of money needed for a daily balanced diet. However, the recommendations have been ignored without any rationale.

Bahutva’s report also demonstrates that wages across all types of employment categories have been stagnant since 2012 and women workers across the spectrum are at the bottom of this earnings pyramid. Effectively, owing to their economic situation, a significant majority are deprived of building their capabilities and are rendered to be in a situation where they can’t ‘do’ as a citizen.

Contrast this with the fact that the nominal per capita GDP has increased by 60% between 2012 and 2023. Another recent paper authored by Thomas Pikkety, Lucas Chancel, Nitin Bharti and Anmol Somanchi of the World Inequality Lab demonstrates historic levels of wealth inequality in India with the top 1% holding 40% of the national wealth. What are the implications of such high levels of wealth inequality from the standpoint of power, citizenship and capabilities?

On power, paraphrasing Eric Liu, Baratunde says that ‘it is the ability to have others do what we want.’ Owing to high concentration of wealth among the few, the wealthy elite in India will inevitably bend political parties for favours with contracts and tax cuts in lieu of quid pro quo like political funding. This is precisely what the electoral bonds scam has revealed. When a few are able to wield such extraordinary pull with political parties, it bodes disaster for India as it can lead to mass disenfranchisement.

For others to exercise power, as conceived by Baratunde, it is imperative that the poor have an equal say as the elite. But the playing field is highly uneven. To mitigate this, the annual budget, seen as a moral signal of the government’s priorities, needs to create a level playing field. However, from the budget allocations, the government’s continued tilt towards the elite becomes obvious.

The budget allocation for health, education, and employment are all one-third or one-fourth of what they should be. In conjunction with low incomes, worsening quality of public education and expensive privatised healthcare pushes the poor to be under-nourished, run helter-skelter for good education, face discrimination and remain stuck in a cycle of debt trap. In summary, the poor are left to scavenge the crumbs of crony capitalism. Such a structural deprivation of human freedoms further marginalises the poor. When plagued with such hazardous levels of asymmetry and lopsided abilities to influence the political class, how will those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds ever be able to exercise power in the way Baratunde has laid out?

Citizenship has also been a vital plank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to garner Hindu votes by targeting Muslims. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that under the BJP regime, there is State sanction in subjugating Indian Muslims. Documenting the cruel callisthenics of power, Amnesty International observed that just between April and June 2022, there were a total of 128 demolitions, robbing numerous Muslims – and only Muslims – of their basic rights by rendering them homeless. Recently, the government has announced the formulation of rules for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). It cannot be mistaken that, seen along with the National Register of Citizens, the CAA is an obvious attempt to legalise religious discrimination and a mechanism to further strip the ability of Muslim citizens ‘to be’ and ‘to do.’

What we are witnessing therefore is a structural stripping away of enfranchisement on communal lines and of those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds. While a handful can exercise a broad suite of freedoms, the majority are deprived of even basic freedoms. It makes the Mohans of the country appear to be living in a virtual reality show where they are made to run on a treadmill as the scenery around them is altered to create a make believe world of progress. This process has assumed a more expansive form as any form of dissent is being crushed. Indeed, the repeated crackdown on any kind of protests, incarcerating peaceful dissenters, curbing academic freedom and by arbitrarily shrinking the space for peaceful resistance against government actions, the regime has attempted to further reduce the essence of citizens ‘to be’ or ‘to do.’ The systematic targeting of opposition parties further narrows the space for common people for ‘doing’ citizenship. When the amendment of citizen as a verb is near completion, how will Indians lift themselves out of being passive nouns ?

No matter what one’s political persuasion is, it must worry us all that the kind of politics brandished by the BJP regime is a dangerous precedent from the perspective of imagining citizens as a verb owing to the systemic impoverishment of our mental and physical capabilities. At present, only a handful of affluent are able to disproportionately exercise their power. We need to choose what kind of citizenship we want. Do we want to be clipped of capabilities and be abstract nouns or do we want to be truly engaged in democratic nation building as active verbs? The choice is ours.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bangalore and is affiliated with LibTech India. The views expressed are personal.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Laavanya Tamang for valuable feedback on an earlier draft.

Rohingya Conundrum: Stateless, Helpless and Unwanted

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar persecuted and run out of their homeland, face a perilous future.

Last week, dozens of Rohingya refugees drowned after a wooden boat they were travelling in capsized off Indonesia’s Aceh province. About 69 refugees were saved by local fishermen and Indonesian rescue services.

Survivors reported that the boat carried 150 refugees and at least 50 were feared dead. However, those who were rescued faced the wrath of the local residents who did not welcome their arrival.

Indeed, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar persecuted and run out of their homeland, are unwelcome nearly everywhere.

In November 2023, a boat carrying 200 Rohingya refugees was pushed back into the sea by the locals in Aceh.

After a military crackdown in 2017, nearly one million Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh.

The Rohingya are seen as “foreigners” and designated as “Bengalis” by the majority Buddhist ruling classes of Myanmar. They have been denied citizenship and excluded from any future vision of Myanmar, as the nation grapples with issues of ethnicity, religion and citizenship.

Although the Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations, they are not recognised as an official ethnic group of the nation.

They are not included in the 135 ethnic groups officially recognised by the government. The Rohingya have been denied citizenship since 1982, with the UN describing them as the “world’s largest stateless population.”

Hounded and persecuted, most fled to Bangladesh but they have also found refuge in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and India.

In Bangladesh most of them live in densely populated camps in Cox’s Bazar. To decongest the camps, some have been shifted 60 kilometre away from the mainland to the cyclone-prone Bhasan Char Island in the Bay of Bengal.

Their isolation further reduces their chances of access to basic rights or of finding long-term solution to their plight.

The Rohingya having made the dangerous sea journey to Bangladesh are once again taking to the sea.

The conditions in the camps have deteriorated over the years.

Few work opportunities, dependence on aid, lack of formal and recognised education for their children and threatened by the violence of criminal gangs in the camps, have pushed many to venture on risky sea journeys in search of safer refuge elsewhere.

Their vulnerability also makes them prime targets for exploitation by traffickers and smugglers.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), 2023 was the deadliest year at sea for the Rohingya in the nine years since they fled Myanmar – 569 of them died while trying to escape in search of a better future.

The UNHCR noted a qualitative change in those risking death at sea as “66% of those embarking on these deadly journeys” were women and children.

The Rohingya remaining in Myanmar have increasingly also been caught in the ongoing war between the state’s armed forces and the rebel Arakan Army.

Since the beginning of this year, Rohingya civilians have been killed or injured in the fighting, according to the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative. There are reports of the Myanmar Army’s forced conscription of young Rohingya men to fight the Arakan Army. Equally there are reports of the Arakan army using Rohingya villages in the Rakhine as human shields.

Safe neither at home nor abroad, the Rohingya are clearly the “nowhere people” of this century – stateless, helpless and unwanted.

This Special Report on the Rohingya refugees was produced in collaboration with the Calcutta Research Group and the Asian Broadcasting Union.

This article was originally published on 360info.

Who Belongs, and How? Locating the CAA in Today’s India

The CAA represents a tendency in the ideological formulation of citizenship that redefines the idea of the political community. If the NRC as it has unfolded in Assam congealed the relationship between legal status and blood ties, the CAA has installed an exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship.

Excerpted from the introduction of Anupama Roy’s Citizenship Regimes, Law and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Seventy years after the installation of republican citizenship through the termination of ties with the colonial regime and the inscription of ‘We the People’ as the ‘source’ of authority of the Constitution, citizenship in India has become deeply contested. While there were contests over citizenship in the past, the contemporary period is distinctive for the unprecedented display of a ‘heightened consciousness’ (Heater 1999, Faulks 2000) about citizenship, which spans the breadth of the country. This ‘citizenship consciousness’ has become manifest in the deep fault-lines caused by changes in the citizenship law, which has produced a citizenship regime inconsistent with the constitutional imaginary. In the summer of 2016, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in the Parliament which was entrusted to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for scrutiny. The CAB was eventually passed in December 2019 when the NDA returned to power in May 2019 with an overwhelming majority in the Lok Sabha. In enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, the ruling NDA invoked the constitutionally mandated power of the Parliament to legislate on all matters pertaining to citizenship. The CAA 2019 was brought with the objective of offering citizenship to those Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis who had fled Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to escape religious persecution and had sought refuge in India before 31 December 2014. BJP leaders asserted that the amendment was essential to correct historical injustices caused by the partition of the country on the basis of religion and the failure of Pakistan to protect its minorities, to which both India and Pakistan had committed themselves in 1950. Through this articulation, the CAA 2019 recognised the right of specified religious communities to return ‘home’, in the fulfilment of a moral claim to obtain the legal protection of citizenship, whose denial would perpetuate a historical wrong.

Anupama Roy
Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging
Oxford University Press, 2022

In this work I would attempt to bring the CAA to an anthropological scrutiny, locating the contemporary form and content of the citizenship law in a ‘matrix… of historical experience’ (Guha 1982, 140-141). The law of citizenship in India may be seen as located within a realm of contestation over ideas of who belongs and how. The history of this contest and its resolution show distinct logics through which membership and terms of belonging were laid down in law, entrenching successive citizenship regimes. The association of the term ‘regime’ with citizenship is crucial for making the argument that law must be seen not only in terms of its bare provisions, but also examined for its political and ideological embeddedness. The ‘bare act’ of citizenship which comes to us as an accumulation of successive amendments represents the law’s coalescent present. The different temporalities of law are compressed in the bare act, occluding the historical layers and flows that have marked the changes that occurred through successive amendments.

Citizenship in contemporary India represents a coalescence of tendencies which have emanated from successive citizenship regimes spawned by the earlier periods of change in the citizenship law. The amendment in 2003 may be considered a hinge point from which the NRC and the CAA emerged and have become an integral part of the ideological landscape of citizenship in contemporary India. Having emerged as discrete tendencies out of the 2003 amendment in the Citizenship Act, the NRC and CAA have become conjoined to produce a spectre of national citizenship based on the logic of descent as the organising principle. While the NRC, as the experience in Assam has shown us, is a legal regime of enumeration of Indian citizens based on evidence that establishes a legacy of inherited belonging, it is simultaneously, and often primarily, presented as a modality of identifying illegal migrants. The CAA is embedded in the idea of national-majoritarian citizenship with religion as its distinguishing principle. The CAA makes a distinction among illegal migrants to identify those among them who would be considered eligible for Indian citizenship through naturalisation. These two principles – of descent as the organising principle of citizenship and religion-based citizenship – have coalesced in the ruling practices of the current political regime to become decisive in determining who belongs to the political community.

The inscription of the ‘Assam exception’ in the Citizenship Act, the IMDT Act 1983 and its repeal in 2005, and the Assam Accord have reverberated in the contemporary landscape of citizenship. Indeed, the framing of illegality within which immigration from Bangladesh came to be seen in a national security framework, was reiterated in the Supreme Court judgement in the Assam Samhilita Mahasangh case in December 2014, in which the court laid down the framework for updating the NRC in Assam. Indeed, in an extension of the court’s position in the Sarbanand Sonowal Case (2005), it made the fortification of territorial boundaries as well as the protection of population a function of state sovereignty. The persistence of the Sarbanand Sonowal judgement in contemporary debates on citizenship is seen in the manner in which the JPC in recommending the CAB 2016 for the consideration of the Parliament, quoted the judgement to assert that ‘misconceived’ ideas of secularism must not come in the way of extending the protection of citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities who faced persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

…The CAA represents a tendency in the ideological formulation of citizenship that redefines the idea of the political community. If the NRC as it has unfolded in Assam congealed the relationship between legal status and blood ties, the CAA has installed an exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship. The CAA 2019 purports to extend the protection of citizenship to those facing religious persecution and simultaneously puts in place a regime which discriminates on the ground of religion. Amidst the possibility of a nation-wide NRC, the CAA made the question of ‘documentary citizenship’ (Sadiq 2009) more perplexing.

Anupama Roy is also the author of Citizenship in India and Mapping Citizenship in India.

Chart: India Sees Relatively Few Refugees from CAA Countries

Only 12 refugees from Bangladesh and none from Pakistan were registered in India with the official agency as of mid-2023.

Controversy around the Citizenship Amendment Act was renewed in India Monday as the government announced the implementation of the law passed in 2019 that opens a new path to citizenship for past arrivals from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The act has been deemed anti-Muslim as it only applies to Hindu, Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Christian refugees from the three Muslim-majority countries, but leaves out Muslim refugees. It also does not take into account non-Muslim refugees from non-Muslim countries and only applies to those who arrived in 2014 or earlier.

Protests against the act had turned violent in 2019 and 2020 and flared up again in some parts of the country, including in major cities, in Kerala and in Assam in India’s Northern region that hosts the most Muslims. Opposition-led West Bengal and Kerala announced that they would not be implementing the law.

Upon its passage in 2019, the act was looking to cut the wait time to acquire citizenship for those included down to a minimum of five years. Now, 2014 arrivals are already quite close to the regular 11-year cutoff for the naturalization of foreigners in India. However, the act includes another crucial exemption for the covered groups, the ability to apply for citizenship even without being able to prove legal residence since arrival.

According to data from the UNHCR, the law is in fact ignoring the largest refugee groups in India and if it is aiding the included groups, it would likely be those without documentation. Only 12 refugees from Bangladesh and none from Pakistan were registered in India with the official agency as of mid-2023. The largest groups of refugees and asylum-seekers in the country come from Sri Lanka, the Muslim minority of Rohingyas in Myanmar and from China, specifically Tibet. Afghanistan is the exception with more than 13,000 registered refugees and asylum-seekers in India – however, due to the ongoing conflict affecting all population groups in the country, these could be either Muslims (including of the persecuted Hazara ethnic group) or members of the smaller Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and potentially Christian minorities of Afghanistan.

Indian Census data shows that immigration waves from Pakistan as well as Bangladesh happened before 1991, when almost 80 percent of those who were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh and lived in India in 2011 immigrated. Between 2002 and 2011, only 6.5-7.5 percent of all immigrants from these two countries arrived in India.

You will find more infographics at Statista, where this article was originally published.

Rules Under CAA Now Ready, Likely to Be Notified Before 2024 Elections: Reports

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act became a law in December 2019, but has been non-functional for the last four years as the Ministry of Home Affairs sought repeated extensions to frame the rules under it.

New Delhi: Reports say that the ruled under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) – under works ever since the Act was passed at the end of 2019 – are now ready and will be notified before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The CAA was passed in the Lok Sabha on December 10, 2019 and in the Rajya Sabha two days later after it was introduced in the upper house by Union home minister Amit Shah. The move drew heavy criticism from politicians and citizens alike for ostensibly singling out Muslims and excluding them from its purview.

The Act aims to provide citizenship to Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians purportedly fleeing persecution from India’s Muslim-majority neighbours; namely, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The notable absence of Muslims from the provisions of the legislation, irrespective of whether or not they are being persecuted in their countries, as well as the unconstitutional nature of the legislation when coupled with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), had drawn widespread protests from thousands of citizens across the country.

Despite the protests and violence that ensued, the government notified the law in January 2020. Yet, the rules have remained unwritten until now, four years later.

According to The Indian Express, the rules are now ready and an online portal to apply for citizenship under the CAA is also in place. “We are going to issue the rules for the CAA in the coming days. Once the rules are issued, the law can be implemented and those eligible can be granted Indian citizenship,” the newspaper quoted sources as saying.

“All things are in place and yes, they are likely to be implemented before the elections. The applicants will have to declare the year when they entered India without travel documents. No document will be sought from the applicants. Requests of the applicants, who had applied after 2014, will be converted as per the new rules,” these sources continued when asked about the timing.

The Economic Times reports that the deadline put in place in the original Act – which was limited to those who had come to India before December 31, 2014 – is likely to be extended.

Over the last few years, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have brought up the CAA multiples times in rallies and promised that the Act will soon be functioning. Most recently, Shah said at a rally in West Bengal last week, “Didi (West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee) often misleads our refugee brothers regarding the CAA. Let me make it clear that the CAA is the law of the land and no one can stop it. Everybody is going to get citizenship. This is our party’s commitment.”

A bunch of petitions challenging the legal validity of the CAA are pending before the Supreme Court. In October, the Union government submitted an affidavit in the court defending the law and calling it a “benign piece of legislation”.

In Charts: What the External Affairs Ministry Told Parliament About the Indian Diaspora

The eye-catching number that was submitted this time was about the number of Indian citizens who had given up their citizenship.

New Delhi: From the big number of 13 million Indians living abroad to listing which countries have seen Indians being sworn in as new citizens, the written replies by the Ministry of External Affairs to parliament questions have provided much-need granular data on the current status of the diaspora.

Here is a selection of the most interesting data sets that the Ministry of External Affairs included in written replies to lawmakers in the monsoon session which ended last Friday (August 11).

The eye-catching number that was submitted this time was about the number of Indian citizens who had given up their citizenship each year over the past decade.

The MEA has reported that according to records spanning from 2011 to the end of June 2023, a total of 1.75 million Indians have voluntarily relinquished their passports. Since India does not permit dual citizenship, surrendering their Indian passport becomes obligatory once individuals acquire citizenship of another country.

During the period from 2011 to 2019, there was a consistent upward trend in the number of Indians renouncing their citizenship annually. However, this trend nearly halved in 2020, a year marked by widespread lockdowns. The count of surrendered passports experienced a significant surge in 2021, reaching a record high of 225,620 in 2022. This notable increase can, of course, in part be attributed to pent-up demand.

Although it is unlikely that the current year will surpass the exceptional record set in 2022, the figures from the initial six months suggest that there will indeed be another substantial collection of surrendered Indian passports.

As the next map shows, Indians have acquired the citizenship of 135 countries over this period, ranging from the smallest country in the world, Vatican City, to the United States, and even the Pacific nation of Tonga.

While the MEA didn’t give the break-up of surrendered Indian passports for each country of the above data set, it has provided the specifics for a more limited timeframe of the past five years.

Responding to a similar question in the Rajya Sabha, the foreign ministry furnished a list categorised by country, detailing the instances of Indian citizenship renunciations spanning 2018 to June 2023.

Not surprisingly, the United States attracted the highest number of Indian citizens – accounting for nearly 40% of all surrenders of passport. Canada was a distant second, followed by Australia and the United Kingdom.

During that same period, 128 Indian nationals became Nepali citizens, followed by 106 of Sri Lanka and 69 of Pakistan. In East Asia, 2,442 Indian passports were surrendered to take up Chinese citizenship since 2018.

Yemen, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo each witnessed only a single instance of an Indian acquiring their nationality over the past five years.

How many NRIs are there?

According to the MEA, the most recent authoritative statistic for the count of Indian nationals residing overseas stands at 13.6 million as of 2022. The largest concentration is situated in the Gulf region, with North America in second place.

A significant population of Indian nationals was also found to be residing and employed in various other South Asian nations. Notably, Nepal alone hosted 600,000 Indian nationals according to figures from the previous year. Furthermore, as per the MEA’s response, there remained approximately 3,087 Indian nationals in Afghanistan until at least 2022, more than a year after the Taliban assumed control of the country.

The Indian Community Welfare Fund, operated by each Indian embassy or high commission, is financed through levies collected through consular services. Therefore, it is not surprising that the size of the diaspora is almost proportional to the collection of fees for ICWF, which is used for assistance for distressed citizens abroad.

While the UAE hosts the largest number of Indian nationals, it is pushed to the second place by the United States in the amount of fees collected for ICWF, as per the list maintained by the MEA. In total, Indian missions in 141 countries collected Rs 217 crore for the ICWF from 2020 to 2022.

While the diaspora keeps on increasing, there has also been a rise in the number of reported cases of illegal migration or human trafficking.

The MEA keeps track of undocumented migration, especially of blue collar workers to the 18 countries which require further Emigration Check Required (ECR) clearance.

As per the MEA’s reply, prosecution is pursued in only about 4% of the complaints forwarded to the state government.

In an answer to another question about the death of a Gujarati family while attempting to illegally cross the Canadian border, the MEA pointed to the low conviction rates in human trafficking cases. Referring to the records of the National Crime Records Bureau, the conviction rate in human trafficking cases was 22% in 2019, 10.6% in 2020 and 16% in 2021.

Constant Screening for Enemies Within Undermines Indians as Citizens

The spectre of terrorism and national security is being frequently raised to disenfranchise certain people.

I had not thought about my citizenship until December 12, 2019, when the government of India in Parliament converted the Citizenship Amendment Bill into an Act. Three days later, sporadic protests broke out in a few universities across India, which gradually turned into a full-fledged resistance led by Muslim women, many of them semi-literate and traditionally unempowered. Those two months of resistance – imaginative and Gandhian – made me reflect on yet another privilege of mine: citizenship.

On December 12, 2019, the Indian Parliament, overwhelmingly dominated by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, did two things. One, it added a political premium to Indian citizenship, making it less about a human being’s history and even lesser about her social experiences. Two, it linked citizenship to religions which were regarded as Indian in origin. Or to put it the way Vinayak Savarkar preferred – making India unquestionably the land of people whose pitr-bhoomi and punya bhoomi it was. In this formulation, birth was a mere accident. And choice, a tragedy.

By this amendment to the Indian citizenship rule, the government heeded the argument of those in the Constituent Assembly, for instance, P.S. Deshmukh, who had argued for both these factors – premium and religion – as determinants of Indian citizenship. In 1949, Deshmukh, a Congress man, was out-debated by his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly. But in 2019, 70 years later, he finally prevailed.

There are three reasons why I am writing about citizenship now. One, it’s December, three years since we went back to 1949. Two, I recently spoke at a colloquium on citizenship, which forced me to think about what it means and how the government uses the argument of national security to deny human rights to a few. Make no mistake. Citizenship is the most basic of human rights in the world divided up as different sovereign nations, with each installing gatekeepers to allow some people in and keeping some out. In this world, human dignity itself flows from the citizenship. Imagine human beings that no nation wants?

Also read: Detention, Criminalisation, Statelessness: The Aftermath of Assam’s NRC

And three, today, there are two concurrent movements in India pertaining to citizenship. One is the legal framework (under the CAA) to deny or revoke the citizenship of certain people, which currently is in abeyance. And the other is the concerted diminishing of citizenship rights of bona fide Indian citizens, through specific laws that target their rights and liberty, reducing them to an inferior status in comparison to others.

The most obvious example of this is the Kashmir Valley, where since the revocation of Article 370 in August 2019, people were forced to live under prolonged curfew for almost a year. The Valley also frequently faces communication blackout, throwing people off the internet highway. The longest of this was after August 2019, when the people were without internet access for over 200 days. In a digital world, where everything from education and employment to medical care is digitised, deliberate denial of the internet is tantamount to solitary confinement.

But I am not writing about Kashmir here. I am writing about mainland India, the land of free and equal opportunities. But conditions apply. Of course, conditions have been applying right after independence, despite the pragmatism and magnanimity of the Constitution, but the situation had not become as precarious as it has been in the last few years. The reason for this is simple. In addition to specific laws, passed Constitutionally, that restrict select communities’ rights to practice and propagate their religion as they deem fit, or curb their rights to ply their traditional trade etc., the government has been winking at the emergence of extra-Constitutional armed and vigilante groups which act as law-enforcers by terrorising ordinary citizens. Since these groups claim impunity from the State, these victims can’t even expect justice from the State!

Citizenship has three aspects. The first is legal or constitutional. This determines the rights and privileges of being a citizen. Participation in democratic processes. Access to government facilities and largesse—from rations, education, healthcare to subsidised housing. Assurance of security of life and livelihood, as well as practice of religion and celebration of festivals. When the State deems one practice as cultural and another as religious it diminishes the Constitutional aspects of citizenship.

The second is social, which refers to the ease of living or the quality of life one can have. This translates into what citizenship mean to ordinary people in their everyday life. The familiarity with the place, neighbours, culture, food, language and even religious practices. People should be able to live where they are happy and not just secure. They should be able to enjoy their lives and not just exist. Refusal to rent places to people because of their religion or eating habits lead to religious and caste segregations in cities. It creates ghettos not just in the physical space but mental too. And mental ghettos lead to insecurity.

This brings in the third aspect of citizenship: security. Not only must the State assure equal security to all, but it should also remove insecurity among people about one another. Instead, today the State is leading in fostering insecurity among people. This not only restricts access of certain people to full citizenship rights, but it also makes them vulnerable to suspicion by fellow citizens as well as law-enforcement agencies. The spectre of terrorism and national security is being frequently raised to disenfranchise certain people.

Also read: ‘We, the People’, Citizenship and Historical Constitution

For example, nearly 30% of all undertrials in Indian prisons are Muslims, while the total Muslim population of India is just about 14 per cent. A large number of these either already have or are likely to spend over a decade as undertrials. An overworked judiciary is not the only reason for this. Many of these prisoners are charged, without evidence, under non-bailable acts, such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. According to one fact-checking website, since 2014, 10,552 Indians have been booked under the UAPA and only 253 have been convicted so far. Clearly, the UAPA is being used as a political tool to deny rights and liberty to certain people. No prizes for guessing who these could be.

Sadly, none of these fosters security because honestly the source of our insecurity lies outside the borders of India, not within. Constant screening for enemies within only undermines us as citizens and adds to our collective insecurity. Insecure people are unhappy people. Something to reflect upon as we prepare to usher in the new year.

Ghazala Wahab is editor FORCE magazine. Her recent book is Born A Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India.

Ahead of CAA Hearing, Union Govt Asks Supreme Court to Dismiss Pleas Challenging Law

The MHA also defended the exclusion of certain areas of Assam and other Northeastern states from the application of the CAA, saying it has been done to “protect the ethnic/linguistic rights”.

New Delhi: The Union government on Sunday (October 30) told the Supreme Court that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) is a “benign piece of legislation”, and asked the court to dismiss pleas challenging its validity. The Ministry of Home Affairs added that the law seeks to provide a relaxation (on citizenship) to specific communities from certain countries with a cut-off date, The Hindu reported.

The MHA also defended the exclusion of certain areas of Assam and other Northeastern states from the application of the CAA, saying it has been done to “protect the ethnic/linguistic rights” of the natives and this was “not discriminatory”.

The CAA is a “focused law” that grants citizenship only to members of six specified communities who came on or before December 31, 2014 and does not affect the legal, democratic or secular rights of any Indian, the MHA said in a 150-page affidavit.

Also, the existing regime for obtaining citizenship by foreigners of any country continues to be untouched by the present law, the MHA said ahead of the hearing of petitions on the contentious CAA that had sparked protests in various parts of the country in late 2019 and early 2020 over alleged discriminatory provisions.

Also read: Anyone Else Notice What Modi Said About the CAA in His Letter to Afghanistan’s Embattled Sikhs?

A bench comprising Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit and Justices S. Ravindra Bhat and Bela M. Trivedi is scheduled to hear as many as 232 petitions, mostly PILs, on October 31 on the issue of CAA.

The MHA affidavit said that the law is “narrowly tailored” and only those migrants “belonging to the six specified communities from the three countries who had entered into India on or before December 31, 2014 will be covered by the provisions of this Amendment Act”.

“These migrants are already living in India. The Amendment Act does not have any provision which provides for the grant of citizenship to such migrants who would have come after December 31, till date or on any future date. It is respectfully submitted that the CAA, 2019 does not in any way encourage illegal migration into Assam,” it said.

The MHA said parliament is competent to make laws for the whole or any part of the territory of India as provided in Article 245 (1) of the Constitution and the issues of policy domain cannot be challenged in a court of law.

“It is further submitted that this is a focused law that has a specific cut-off date of December 31, 2014. Therefore, only such migrants belonging to the six specified communities from the three countries who had entered into India on or before December 31, 2014 will be covered by the provisions of this Amendment Act,” it said.

Seeking dismissal of the pleas, the affidavit, filed by Sumant Singh, a joint secretary in the MHA, said, “There is no provision in CAA which would affect the distinct language, script or culture of citizens of Assam and other North-Eastern States.”

The Union government said the Assamese people have the full right to conserve their language, script or culture in accordance with the Constitution and the CAA only makes eligible a class of foreigners who had taken shelter in India on or before December 31, 2014 due to persecution faced by them in three specified countries over their religion.

“It is submitted that CAA does not encourage any future influx of foreigners into India as it applies to past events and has no application in futuro. Therefore, CAA is not violative of ..the Constitution,” it said.

The Union government said the CAA facilitates the grant of citizenship to migrants belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India on or before December 31, 2014.

It said the law applied to those who have been exempted by the Central government under the provisions of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 and other relevant provisions and the rules made under the Foreigners Act, 1946.

It also said that these migrants are already living in India and the amended law does not have any provision which provides for the grant of citizenship to such migrants who would have come after the specified date or on any future date.

“It is respectfully submitted that the CAA does not in any way encourage illegal migration into Assam and therefore the petition that it has the potential to encourage illegal migration into Assam is unfounded,” it said.

Watch: BJP Continues to Fool India on the CAA. Here’s 5-Point Fact Check.

It said the petitions are liable to be dismissed and reserved its right to file a more detailed affidavit at a later stage.

The MHA said the classification of tribal area of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram or Tripura as included in the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution and the area covered under “The Inner Line” notified under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 has been made “on tangible material, historical reasons and the already prevalent classifications.”

“It is submitted that said classification of excluded areas is based on factors surrounding the fundamental differences in the population density, the constitutional obligation of protection of native culture, the economic and social inability/impact in case of mass migration and reasons concerning national security…,” it said.

Referring to the Assam Accord, the affidavit said that specific concerns with regard to Assam and the other Northeastern states have been taken into consideration while enacting the CAA in 2019.

It said the CAA is not limited to Assam and will be applicable throughout the country except tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura as included in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and areas covered under “Inner Line” as notified under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873.

The top court had issued notice to the Union government and had sought its response by the second week of January 2020.

The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and others, including Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, RJD leader Manoj Jha, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra and AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi, have filed pleas on the issue.

In January 2020, the apex court had said it would not stay the law before hearing the Union government’s arguments.

(With PTI inputs)

Watch: Why Have Indians Been Giving up Citizenship After Modi Government Came to Power?

During the ongoing rule of the Narendra Modi government since 2014, more than nine lakh people have so far abandoned their Indian citizenship.

During the ongoing rule of the Narendra Modi government since 2014, more than nine lakh people have so far abandoned their Indian citizenship. Is the decline in the economy responsible for this? In this video, The Wire probes the main causes.

The Enduring Relevance of Rajendra Prasad’s Speech, Made Hours Before India’s Independence

In his speech, India’s first president speaks about the importance of non-violence and Gandhian ideals of truth and tolerance.

Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, gave this speech on August 14, 1947, just before India achieved independence. Because his thoughts on non-violence, truth and tolerance continue to have an endearing relevance today, The Wire is reproducing a translated transcript of the speech on Republic Day, January 26, 2022.

At this crucial juncture in our history, when after years and years of struggle, we are finally going to hold the reins of our country’s governance in our own hands, we should remember God, the Supreme Being, who shapes the destiny of individuals and countries.

Let us pay homage to the many men and women, known and unknown, who laid down their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to attain the freedom of this day, those who happily climbed the gallows, and boldly embraced the bullets. Those who gave up their lives languishing in jails and on the island of Kala Pani, who without hesitation left behind their parents, their wives and children, their familial ties, and even the country and offered their life and wealth in sacrifice. This day to which we stand witness is a result of their rigour and sacrifice.

We must also offer our reverence and devotion to Mahatma Gandhi, who has been our guide for 20 years – the only ray of hope and fervour. He is the essence of our culture and the heart of our life, whose presence has kept us alive even in the midst of all the trials and tribulations of history. He dragged us out of the dark pit of despair and troubles and instilled a spirit in our hearts that allowed us to muster the courage and strength to stake claim to independence, our birthright.

He handed us the infallible weapon of satya and ahimsa [truth and non-violence], through which we acquired the invaluable gem of swaraj [independence] without having to take up arms, at a paltry cost, for such a large country and crores of its people. With great cleverness, indomitable determination and unshakeable faith in the people of the country, in his weapon and, above all, in God, he led the weak people like us. It is, therefore, our duty to remain truthful and steadfast.

I hope that in the hour when it gains victory, India will neither abandon nor underestimate the value of the weapon which pulled the country from the pit of despair and made evident its power and utility.

As people across the world are frustrated and tired of wars over shaping their future, that weapon has an enormous task at hand. But India cannot accomplish this great task by mimicking others from afar, nor can it be accomplished by accumulating weapons or competing with others in building such weapons which can cause maximum destruction in minimum time.

Today, this country has got the chance and we hope that it will have the courage and strength to showcase this weapon to save the world from war, death and destruction. The world needs it, and will welcome it too, if it wants to avoid falling back in the age of barbarism, above which it boasts to have risen.

We want to assure all the countries of the world that we want to treat everyone with friendship and cordiality as per our tradition. We have no hatred towards anyone. We do not want to kill anyone and hope that no one will do it to us either.

We have only one hope and aspiration and that is that we may be helpful in establishing freedom for all and peace and happiness among mankind.

The country which God and nature had made one, has been divided into two today. Parting is always painful, not only with people close to us but even with those we have known only for a while. Therefore, I must say that we are deeply saddened by this partition.

But in spite of this, on your behalf and on our behalf, we want to extend our best wishes and goodwill to the people of Pakistan for their progress and success.

We extend our best wishes to those who are disheartened by the Partition and have been left behind in Pakistan. No one should panic. We must preserve our home, religion and culture and act with courage, courtesy and tolerance.

There is no reason for them to fear that they will not be treated fairly and justly and will not be protected. They must have faith in the assurance given to them. They should aspire to earn due respect by their loyalty and truthfulness towards the land they inhabit.

We want to assure the minorities in India that they will be treated fairly and justly. No distinction will be made between them and others. Their religion, culture, and language will be preserved. And they will get all the rights and credentials of citizenship. They are also expected to remain loyal to the country in which they live and to the legislation of that country.

We want to assure the people that we will make tireless efforts to eradicate poverty, hunger and disease from the country, to eliminate discrimination between people, to prevent exploitation of a human being by another and to mobilise for everyone the means to a beautiful and prosperous life.

This task ahead of us is a Herculean one and we hope that all the people of the country will help and cooperate in it. We expect sympathy and support from the other countries of the world. We hope that we can prove ourselves worthy. God bless us.

Translated from the Hindi original by Naushin Rehman.