With sense and sensibility

National Register highlights need to reform citizenship rules

The contentious exercise that preceded the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam appears to have attracted supporters elsewhere. Last week, the state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanded a similar exercise in West Bengal, as did the Indigenous People's Front of Tripura (IPFT), a part of the state’s ruling alliance in Tripura, the Janata Dal (United) in Nagaland and some activist groups in Meghalaya and Mizoram. Should the government consider these demands? The high-decibel rhetoric surrounding the admittedly flawed process in Assam obscures the substantive aspects of the issue of determining citizenship. It is unexceptionable for any government in any country to establish who its citizens are, more so when citizenship comes bundled with taxpayer-funded welfare benefits. The reality, however, is that this exercise can rarely be benignly conducted.

In Assam, for instance, despite the insistence that the NRC exercise is under Supreme Court scrutiny, the fact is that it is the product of a divisive political accord. This was the memorandum of settlement between the Centre and the leaders of the Assam movement in 1985, demanding the identification and deportation of illegal immigrants. Since the so-called illegal immigrants were principally Muslims of Bangladeshi origin, some of whom have lived and worked in Assam for many generations before independence and others who sought refuge during the Bangladesh war of 1971, it was inevitable that the process would encourage xenophobia. It is no coincidence that Muslims have been at the receiving end of the exclusion from the final NRC draft in Assam (though a substantial number of Hindus find themselves left out as well). In the current charged public discourse over religion, ethnicity and citizenship, it is difficult to envisage a nation-wide NRC process that can be conducted without such ugly controversies, especially in border states where Nepalese and Burmese people form part of the population in states such as Bengal and Uttar Pradesh with large Muslim populations. 

The Assam exercise has also revealed the deficiency in public records, an issue that Aadhaar belatedly addresses but without necessarily establishing citizenship. The Assam NRC process has focused on furnishing legacy documents. The fact is that many so-called bona fide Indian citizens may not be able to immediately furnish these. This is a predicament many Assam residents are facing, with families discovering some of their relatives excluded from the final draft for precisely this reason.

An equally substantive issue is the reform needed in Indian citizenship laws. Over time, they have become complicated and time-consuming; citizenship can sometimes take up to a decade to acquire and involves wearying paperwork. But one important change is required, if only to emphasise the principled humanity of the Indian state. Regardless of one's parents’ national provenance, if a child is born in India and has lived his whole life here and knows no other country, why should he or she not be given Indian citizenship? In short, governments need to approach the issue of citizenship with both sense and sensibility.