The notification of the rules of the Citizenship Amendment Act came as no surprise to the people of Assam. They had been warned by their chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, that the registration of political parties that dared to protest against CAA would be cancelled.
In Delhi too, activists living in predominantly ‘Muslim neighbourhoods’ witnessed an unusually heavy deployment of security forces. Some of the activists were also contacted by the police and warned politely not to get involved in any agitational activity.
What’s interesting instead is the timing if its announcement.
The announcement came right after the Supreme Court dismissed State Bank of India’s (SBI) plea to defer the date of revealing the details of the electoral bonds. It was seen as a major reversal and embarrassment for the Narendra Modi government. To prevent that from dominating the news space, another big news had to be manufactured. And what could be better than the notification of the CAA rules?
The announcement of the CAA rules are yet another iteration of the ideology of the Modi government. It can be summarised in one sentence: to tell Muslims that they do not belong to India in the same measure or manner in which Hindus do. The state will find ways to accommodate Hindus and exclude Muslims.
But as lawyer Aman Wadud has been saying, it is not going to help even the Hindus in Assam, who have been suffering after their exclusion from the NRC. It’s because they can not show the documents stipulated as essential to prove their belonging to India.
The CAA claims to be an instrument that will help people of all religions, barring Muslims, who have suffered persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. But it brings no relief to those Hindus who have declared that they are citizens of India but cannot show the papers asked by the BJP government to prove their claim.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its leaders have been saying that all Hindus would be included under the purview of the act. But how? The CAA asks them to show that they were citizens of Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan. How will they do it? These Hindu citizens, numbering approximately 15 lakhs, would be left stateless. We must understand this before going into the real intent of the CAA and how it affects the secular character of Indian citizenship.
With the notification of CAA, the grounds of Indian citizenship have officially opened a path towards “faith-based” citizenship – a path open to everyone but Muslims. The real intent and impact of the CAA cannot be understood if we do not read it along with the National Register of Citizens (NRC). After all, the home minister has been very clear about one gaining meaning in the company of the other. NRC is a process of exclusion and CAA, one of inclusion.
BJP leaders, including the home minister, have said time and again that NRC would weed out outsiders while CAA would include the left out Hindus.
It also needs to be underlined that NRC brings a very significant change in the concept of Indian citizenship. With the NRC, we already saw a shift from jus soli (citizenship by birth) to jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent). However, the affinity of CAA with NRC is not only fundamental but critical to its implementation in Assam.
Who is CAA-NRC really excluding?
Assam was made the perfect laboratory to execute this model of citizenship re-verification through NRC. Of course, the state provided organic grounds to implement something like this due to the existing demands of the Assamese nationalists. The use of NRC to identify ‘foreigners’ in Assam meant anyone who had ancestry in erstwhile East Bengal, Hindu or Muslim. Their religion didn’t matter to the Assamese nationalist whose long-standing demand was to identify those “illegal Bengali” migrants.
NRC left out over 19 lakh people from the citizenship register. According to a Sabrang report, sourced to the Intelligence Brunch of Assam, only about 4.89 lakh of the total belonged to Bengali origin Muslim community.
Rest of the breakup is as follows: Bengali Hindus (6.90 lakhs), Gorkha (85,000), Assamese Hindu (60,000), Koch Rajbonshi (58,000), Goria Moria Deshi (35,000), Bodo (20,000), Karbi (9,000), Rabha (8,000), Hajong (8,000), Mishing (7,000), Ahom (3,000), Garo (2,500), Matak (1,500), Dimasa (1,100), Sonowal Kachari (1,000), Maran (900), Bishnupriya Manipuri (200), Naga (125), Hmar (75), Kuki (85), Thadou (50), Baite (85).
As one can see, only a few of these people qualify to apply for citizenship under CAA. Technically, the category of Original Inhabitants (OI) also takes away the doubt of many communities listed here.
With the notification of CAA, the only community left out are the Bengali origin Muslim community in Assam. This makes them the primary political victims of the citizenship process of NRC. One can safely conclude that both the process are anti-Muslim projects of the Indian state.
‘Saviour complex’
The notification also comes with a tone of saviour complex. It is trying to claim that India, through CAA, is going to save the non-Muslim persecuted minorities in its neighbouring countries. Such is the control of the narrative in India. But we need to ask again, what about those poor Hindus who could not show the papers? The CAA don’t help them.
One can say, and rightly so, that the objective of the announcement was never to help any community but to create an atmosphere in which Hindus and Muslims are placed on unequal planes. As Sushil Aaron wrote way back in 2019, “Regardless of which process is applied, it is clear that the NRC process has been conceived in a manner that spares Hindus, for the most part, the trouble of proving they are Indian citizens, since the CAA eventually offers pathways to Indian citizenship for them in a way that it does not provide to Muslims.”
The announcement of the CAA rules is a psychological assault on Muslims by reinforcing anxieties about their existence as equal citizens. One CAA is here, can NRC be far behind?
The notification of CAA also comes during the holy month of Ramadan. The timing of this declaration is a symbolic gesture that is pregnant with violence against a community. This violence is, above all symbolic, in nature. In a month when peace, generosity and justice, among other things, is celebrated as virtues, this declaration is a stab at the very secularity of citizenship in India.
Apoorvanand is a professor at Delhi University.
Suraj Gogoi writes about citizenship, minority, nationalism, state, food and violence in South Asia.
