So that you suppose the problems uppermost within the minds of those that rule can be the landslides within the Himalayas or Trump’s tariffs, or our international isolation? Effectively, you’d be flawed, however you may be forgiven for considering so, for that’s how a rational, logic-driven nation ought to suppose. However we’ve misplaced that standing for a decade now and have develop into a Blunderland of nonsense. We at the moment are firmly within the place of Lewis Carroll’s Alice:
“If I had a world of my very own, all the things can be nonsense. Nothing can be what it’s, as a result of all the things can be what it isn’t. And opposite sensible, what’s, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it might. You see?”
You most likely don’t, so let me clarify. The flavour of the season is not one of the points talked about above: it’s citizenship, one thing we thought had been determined 75 years in the past by a liberal Structure which allowed citizenship on grounds of start (jus soli), descent (jus sanguinis), naturalisation and registration. However, as Ambedkar stated, any Structure is just pretty much as good as those that are charged with implementing it — and that’s the reason we’re a Blunderland.
For, the Structure, although unamended on this respect, is being spray-painted in lots of elements of the nation to make sure that sure sections of our huge inhabitants are denied citizenship. An try to take action via laws some years again (the Citizenship Modification Act) hangs in limbo, or the deep freeze which is the Registry of the Supreme Court docket. So now it’s being carried out via a recreation of smoke and mirrors — a Bangladeshi right here, a Rohingya there, an encroacher right here, a Bengali-speaking individual there. However the message is loud and clear — we’re the brand new India, we not brush an issue beneath the carpet, we now push it into Bangladesh at midnight, or right into a detention centre beneath the gavel of a Foreigners’ Tribunal.
However there’s an issue: the Structure has been shoved into the background, and a brand new set of (con)founding fathers have changed it with their model of what constitutes citizenship. The ball was set rolling in 2019 via the CAA, implicitly propounding the idea that solely a Hindu was entitled to citizenship of India. This doctrine has come in useful in Assam to incorporate the few lakh Hindus excluded from the NRC there.
The RSS, not one to be left behind within the Hindutva sweepstakes, proclaimed that Hindustan was for Hindus alone, that an Indian citizen ought to possess each “Bharatiyata” and Bharati “swabhav” (no prizes for guessing who would outline these phrases!). The BJP’s eminence grise, Ram Madhav, went a step additional and demanded that India ought to haven’t a democracy, however a “dharmocracy”. That might in impact rework us right into a twin of a rustic like Iran, presumably with a unique faith on the helm, after all. Believers of different religions might lump it, as second class residents. In brief, Indianness can be outlined by religion and perception, however the Structure.
Enter the Deletion Fee of India (previously the Election Fee of India), which finds conducting elections a boring job and so has now determined to establish residents as an alternative, one thing it’s neither certified nor mandated to do. Not understanding which doc to depend on for proving citizenship, it has prescribed an a la carte menu of 11 paperwork to select from.
It’s one other matter that 90 per cent of Indians don’t possess these certificates. Many specialists estimate that this might outcome within the disenfranchisement of as many as 20 per cent of voters in Bihar. This shortfall will, presumably, be made up by importing voters from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, as a current report by the Reporters Collective appears to point.
As if these variations of citizenship weren’t sufficient, the Supreme Court docket, too, has entered the fray by prescribing a check for a “true citizen” or “Indian” — not questioning the federal government on any matter regarding defence. This novel definition has been supplied in a defamation case in opposition to Rahul Gandhi. The Bombay Excessive Court docket has additionally pitched in by ruling that Aadhaar and Epic (electoral picture identification card) don’t show citizenship. It has additionally added that any protest regarding issues of some other nation — such because the genocide in Gaza by Israel — doesn’t behove any patriotic Indian citizen, who needs to be protesting on home shortcomings similar to piling up of rubbish, and so forth. In different phrases, any dissent disqualifies one from claiming citizenship.
So right here’s what all this pontificating boils right down to: though there seems to be no dearth of definitions as to what constitutes citizenship, there is no such thing as a official single doc which might show one’s citizenship! [The government conceded as much recently in Parliament when, in response to a question as to which document establishes citizenship, the MoS (Home) evaded any answer on this specific point]. We now want a bouquet of paperwork, with the lotus being the centrepiece of this flowery association.
And so, whilst you and I shuttle between the RSS, judiciary, Election Fee and Ram Madhav, it’s no surprise that greater than 18 lakh Indians have determined that they’ve had sufficient and have surrendered their notional citizenship and migrated to different nations within the final 13 years.
They’ve clearly determined {that a} PIO card in hand is value two citizenships within the bush. And extra will proceed to depart our eroding shores, except the brand new “Demography Mission” isolates that individual Indian DNA which defines Bharatiyata as soon as and for all.
In the meantime, don’t quit in your desires: preserve sleeping, for did the Bard not insist that “sleep knits the ravelled sleeve of care”?
— The author is a former IAS officer
