A national register of exclusion(The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level: Basic knowledge of the National Register of Citizens.
Mains level: The news-card analyses the issues and concerns with NRC, in a brief manner.

Context

• By requiring long-term residents of Assam to prove their citizenship by negotiating a thicket made up of bewildering and opaque rules and an uncaring bureaucracy.

• The Indian state has for the past two decades unleashed an unrelenting nightmare of wanton injustice on a massive swathe of its most vulnerable people.

Distressing cycle

• The official presumption that they are foreigners has reduced several million of these highly impoverished, mostly rural, powerless and poorly lettered residents to a situation of helplessness and penury.

• It has also caused them abiding anxiety and uncertainty about their futures.

• They are required to persuade a variety of usually hostile officials that they are citizens, based on vintage documents which even urban, educated, middle-class citizens would find hard to muster.

• And even when one set of officials is finally satisfied, another set can question them. And sometimes the same official is free again to send them a notice, starting the frightening cycle afresh.

Tougher on women

• Women are especially in danger of exclusion from the citizenship register. Typically, they have no birth certificates, are not sent to school, and are married before they become adults.

• Therefore, by the time their names first appear in voters’ lists, these are in the villages where they live after marriage, which are different from those of their parents.

• They are told that they have no documents to prove that they are indeed the children of the people they claim are their parents.

• There were cases of being excluded from citizenship on this ground alone.

Temporary measure became permanent

• The power was vested permanently with junior officials who could doubt the citizenship of any person at any time without assigning any reason.

• Those with the dreaded “D” beside their names had no recourse for appeal under the rules, with years passing without any inquiry.

• The “D” also debarred them from being included in the draft NRC.

To identify anyone as ‘foreigner’

• A third process empowers the Assam Police to identify anyone it suspects to be a ‘foreigner’.

• Again, all that the police claim in most cases is that the person was unable to show them documents establishing his or her citizenship.

• People consistently deny that the police even asked them from documents.

The opaque processes and Foreigners’ Tribunals

• All cases referred by the police are heard by Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs).

• Earlier, retired judges were appointed to these tribunals. The present government has appointed many lawyers who have never been judges.

• There are now FTs in which not a single person has been declared an Indian citizen over several months.

• Many allege that both the police and presiding officers in FTs work to fulfil informal targets to declare people foreigners.

Issues with Foreigners’ Tribunals

• Even if a person finds her name in the NRC, the police can still refer her case to an FT;

• an election official can even deem her to be a “D”-voter. Article 20 of the Constitution includes as a fundamental right that “no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once”. But this principle has been waived for FTs.

• Even after an FT had confirmed a person to be an Indian citizen, another FT and often the same FT can again issue notice to the same person to prove her legitimate citizenship once more.

• A person is never be allowed to feel secure that the state has finally accepted that she is an Indian citizen.

Key Concerns

• No person was given legal aid by the state, which is bound to deploy lawyers paid by the state to fight their cases in the FTs and higher courts.

• People instead spoke of panic spending, of enormous amounts of money to pay lawyers, as well as for costs of travel of witnesses who they bring with them to testify in their favour.

• For this, they have had to sell all their assets or borrow from private moneylenders.

• The large majority of them are poorly educated and very impoverished, doing low-paid work such as drawing rickshaws, or working as domestic work or farm labour.

Conclusion

• With the entire burden of proving citizenship on their shoulders and the arbitrary and opaque multiple forums to which they are summoned, people deprived of both education and resources are caught in a bureaucratic maze from which they find it hard to emerge.

• Trapped at the crossroads of history, their destinies depend on institutions that treat them with undisguised hostility and bias.

Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q1. Government e-Marketplace (GeM) is an e-governance initiative to facilitate

(a) selling of agriculture products in mandis online
(b) online procurement of common use Goods & Services required by various Government Departments.
(c) online bidding and reverse bidding in power sector
(d) auction of coal through online portal

Answer: B

Mains Questions:
Q.1) There are few parallels anywhere else of the state itself producing statelessness in the manner that it is doing in Assam. Critically examine this statement.