The National Register of Citizens
The Citizenship Act, 1955 states that anyone born in India on or after January 26, 1950, up till July 1, 1987, is an Indian citizen by birth. Those born on or after July 1, 1987, but before the commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, will be qualified for Indian citizenship (at birth) if either of their parents is an Indian Citizen. However, with the commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003 the provisions got modified. According to the amended act, both the parents need to be Indian citizens for citizenship to be granted to an individual at birth. The formulation of rules governing citizenship and the conduct of demographic data collection remain key parts of how modern nation-states govern population, determine welfare policy, and (frequently) how electoral politics is organized. In India, both central and state governments have periodically instituted different kinds of demographic surveys to frame indices of social and economic welfare and (re)formulate policies. For instance, currently, the Delhi government is conducting a massive socio-economic survey of the city. It attempts to document a wide range of data about the city’s residents. The particulars of the survey range from income levels to spoken languages to the scope of introducing solar panels to residential buildings across the city. The NRC, however, is a different and far more insidious form of a demographic survey than other routine procedures (including the census) conducted by states.
The register which was executed in Assam in 2019, was a Supreme Court-mandated and monitored exercise- one that quickly raised widespread concerns. To prove citizenship, people in Assam had to produce documents issued before March 24, 1971 — like the 1951 NRC [The only NRC put together and not updated since] or electoral rolls up to March 24, 1971 — to prove that their ancestors lived in India before the aforementioned date. The next step was to furnish documents to establish one’s relationship with the ancestors. These two steps already place inordinate emphasis on identification documents in a context where vulnerability on account of “documented” identity is significant, and is skewed to predispose the poor, dalit, bahujan, religious minorities, married women, and queer groups to losing their citizenship. Those left out of the register were placed in detention camps set up across the state [a fact repeatedly documented across media platforms]. These camps have also witnessed several deaths, according to reports, including children. The most recent death in a detention camp has been reported on the 3rd of January. The detainee’s name was Naresh Koch. The Koch are scheduled tribes in Meghalaya but not in Assam]. At present, there are six detention centres across the state, Goalpara, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Silchar, Kokrajhar and Tezpur, where district jails have been converted to camps. In a written reply dated November 27, the government told the Rajya Sabha that 988 “foreigners” were lodged in these six detention centres.
In Assam, those left out could apply for inclusion. However, it is not clear whether this will remain possible as the register will be introduced to other states — a claim repeated several times by the Home Minister of India and several chief ministers of BJP-controlled states. On 20th November 2019, Home Minister Amit Shah declared in parliament that the register would be extended to the entire country. Despite the recent and ever-increasing denials by the BJP government, and the Prime Minister’s blatant lies about a nation-wide NRC “never having been discussed”, several statements (press statements, speeches in parliaments, and now-deleted-tweets) issued by Union Ministers, BJP chief ministers, and party members do confirm the government’s intention to bring this register to the whole country. There is, of course, no clear statement on how or what documents will be processed for residents of different states, and what the framework for this process will be. A press release put out by the PIB offers no clear answers to what, how, or why the NRC is being so ardently pushed by the centre.
An Indian Express report estimates the monetary cost of the recently concluded NRC in Assam (a state with approximately 1/40th of the Indian population) at approx. Rs 1,600 crore. Suitably scaled, such a venture at a nationwide level could result in a monetary cost of Rs 64,000 crore (40 times that of the cost in Assam). To put this number in perspective, India’s annual education budget was Rs 96,000 crore in 2019 — the monetary cost of the NRC would be at least two-thirds of the annual education budget. In terms of state investment (in manpower, infrastructure, and propaganda) the NRC ill-serves any meaningful end. The BJP-government’s repeated (and now deleted) assertions that the NRC is one step of a two-step formula (NRC + CAA) speaks directly about the party’s (and the RSS’s) commitment to a Hindu-India or at the very least an India where Muslims (and other minorities) are second-class citizens. In the past, modern nation-state’s state-sponsored genocides (and institutionalized xenophobia) have almost always been preceded by the enumeration of “natural” or “rightful” citizens and “illegal infiltrators”, almost always based on ethnic/racial lines- from Rohingyas in Myanmar to Jews in Germany. The NRC is not merely a “modified” census, or the enumeration of populations to serve policy formulation, it is the systematic ordering of a new xenophobic Hindu nation.
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