The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), is seeing massive protests all across the country. Any country must be truly worried when its students from Universities and common people unconnected, spill onto the roads to agitate. Motivated they will be, by a cause that they feel will affect their future. That it is unconnected to education and are still out in the open, must ring alarm bells. To brand it as hijacked by professionals, left liberals and opposition, is an inability to see the pain points. It also must be the enormous maturity that the protestors have shown in realising that this is not about Hindus and Muslims. We must bow to their wisdom. Violence and vandalism have no place in any form of agitation and must be eschewed. That this was seen in some places must be condemned.
Simply put, the ACT proposes to accord citizenship to illegal Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jains, Parsis and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Conversely anyone not associated with these religions will not get citizenship. The Government has to its credit tried to assuage the hurt by explaining the CAA to its people. It has even put out Q/A messages. It is a fact that CAA is not an anti-Muslim law. The agitation However, seems to be not ebbing. What could be the reasons? For a start, it is said that the CAA does not affect or concern any Indian. If so, why at all pass it? Does the theory of Reductio ad Absurdum not hold, where we seek to establish a contention, by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable? Two sides of the problem are immigrants already in the country who would be naturalised and the new ones that the ACT proposes to allow entry to.
The entire North East, especially Assam, Tripura and West Bengal are reeling in disbelief and agitating with a sense of betrayal. The passport and foreigner’s act was amended to allow non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh and Pakistan, to stay back in India even if they entered the country without valid papers in 2015. In a way, was this not a precursor to CAA? Persecution either perceived or real, happens in every country on either religious or racial or political grounds. Under the Indian law, multiple groups such as Tibetans and Sri Lankan Tamils are generally accepted as legal refugees. US too has refugee and asylum laws. In fact every country has laws to protect genuine refugees and asylum seekers. What would CAA facilitate in addition to these provisions?
Opponents and critics cite the ACT as violating the Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the constitution of the country. Article 14 provides for equality before the law. Un-equals can’t be treated equally and equals can’t be treated unequally is its gist. Article 15 deals with the fundamental rights of every citizen and secures them from all kinds of discrimination by the State including that of religion. Article 21 provides that, “No person shall be deprived of his/her life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” An eminent Indian lawyer, an expert in National and International Law, opines that the ‘CAA aims to provide the persecuted minorities in the three countries a special status in the naturalisation process and it does not mean in any way that other communities or people will not be naturalised at all, the rules of general asylum process, continuing to be followed for the other communities. It will However, be interesting to know, why the general refugee/asylum laws were found inadequate in the case of the religions cited or for the countries involved? CAA will need to pass the Supreme Court muster. The role of the executive, the legislature and the Judiciary will come under scrutiny like never before.
Though it is a very laudable move to accord citizenship to the truly persecuted, the CAA does affect the Indians as well, for new immigrants and the old would share the same resources as any other Indian would. The migrants already in India would need to furnish documents that prove their origins which is easier said than done, in addition to many genuine Indians as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) envisages, who would have no documents whatsoever. With economy slowing and employment opportunities shrinking, it is now everyone’s worry.
The North East is worried that the settlement of the migrants will disturb its demographics and stress an already stressed state and its resources. Does it also violate the Assam accord of 1985 which allowed a deportation of all migrants setting 1971 as the cut-off date? Does passing of CAA automatically override the earlier accord? The decadal variation of the population of Assam and India as a whole makes the picture clear, in 1951-61 and 1961-71 the growth in Assam’s population was 35.1% and 34.7% respectively when all India figures those two decades were 21.6% and 24.6% respectively. In these two decades, the food production was only 14% with the cropped area remaining constant. The rate of production of rice and all other agricultural goods were lower than the national average. In light of such mega catastrophes, an agitation started in 1979 and an accord happened in 1985 that set the cut-off date to 1971. Can we afford an encore?
In a country where artificial boundaries are sought to be felled, how prudent is excluding states like Arunachal, Mizoram, Nagaland that require ‘Inner Line Permit’ (ILP), originally created by the British to safeguard their commercial interests, and continues to be applied unjustly to Indians even after the British left, from the ambit of CAA? Can ILP itself be challenged especially when Manipur too is sought to be included under it? Does it not open a window for any State to be included or excluded on the basis of ILP? That ILP violates the one nation – one law theory is another matter. The NRC seeks to register certain relevant information for identification of genuine Indian citizens. It recently left out 19 lakh supposedly many Hindu migrants, who remain illegal. Does the CAA mend this anomaly?
Assam, Tripura, West Bengal or any other State in the country cannot keep adding people on one pretext or the other. Will the secular character of the Indian Constitution accept seemingly contentious Acts? We will soon know, with a host of petitions pending before the Supreme Court.