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വായന

23 July, 2019

Citizenship review a source of worry for minorities

BRP Bhaskar

India Citizens
ndian officials sort papers for illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. File/ Reuters

The sword of Damocles is hanging over the heads of minorities with the Indian government planning to extend to the entire country the scheme to draw up a National Register of Citizens. At present the scheme is confined to the eastern state of Assam.

Influx into Assam from neighbouring states in search of livelihood began during the colonial period. There was large-scale migration to the state from Pakistan’s eastern wing (now Bangladesh) after Partition.  This prompted India to enact a law styled as Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act in 1950.

During the 1951 census, acting on a Home Ministry directive, enumerators recorded particulars of every resident of the state with a view to identifying illegal immigrants and prepared a National Register of Citizens (NRC) excluding them.

It was a dubious exercise as regulations requiring passport and visa for travel between India and Pakistan did not come into force until October 1952. It was only in 1957 that the Foreigners Act of 1946 was amended to bring a Pakistani national within the definition of the term ‘foreigner’.

The 1961 census report estimated that more than 2,200,000 people had entered Assam illegally over a decade.   Identification and expulsion of illegal immigrants was one of the major demands of the All Assam Students Union and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad which launched an agitation that disrupted life in the state for six years from 1979. 

The Assam Accord, which the state government signed with AASU and AAGSP at the instance of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, provided for detection and expulsion of  all those who entered the state illegally between January 1, 1966 and March 24, 1971.

However, the process did not go beyond a pilot project aimed at updating the NRC in two small administrative units to help identify the illegal immigrants there.

In 2013 the Supreme Court, acting on two writ petitions, ordered state-wide updating of the NRC. The process has been going on ever since under the court’s supervision.

 There have been charges that the updating process is vitiated by political and bureaucratic manipulation. As many as 3.6 million out of 4.1 million whose names were dropped from the NRC have appealed against their exclusion.

The nation was shocked when Mohammad Sanaullah, a Kargil war veteran and recipient of the President’s Medal, was declared a foreigner and dragged to a detention centre in Assam recently. He languished there for a fortnight before the high court released him on bail, pending scrutiny of the issue of his citizenship.  

On the government’s own admission the NRC, as it now stands, leaves out many genuine names and includes many bogus names.

The deadline the Supreme Court set for completing the process of updating the NRC expires on July 31. It is clear that the work cannot be finished by that date.  Some 2.5 million people whose petitions against exclusion from NRC have sought extension of the deadline.  It is for the apex court to take a call on the issue.

According to a Congress MP, the vexatious citizenship issue has resulted in 57 suicides in the state so far.

Even as Assam struggles to produce a clean NRC, Home Minister Amit Shah told Parliament that the government intends to extend the NRC nationwide to “wean out illegal immigrants from every inch of this country”. In its election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party had said it would extend the NRC scheme to the other states in a phased manner. It views its mandate as popular approval for the idea. But illegal immigration was not a live issue in any state other than Assam and a nationwide NRC did not figure prominently even in the BJP’s election campaign anywhere.

The BJP’s fascination for an all-India NRC cannot be divorced from its concept of India as a Hindu nation and its strategy of promoting communal polarisation to achieve that end. Quite naturally the move has caused unease in the minorities, particularly Muslims, who more often than not are Hindutva’s targets.

The communal mindset behind the BJP’s approach to the citizenship issue is evident from its decision to accept all Hindus and Buddhists who came into India from the neighbouring countries. 

It is not clear what the government proposes to do with those excluded from the NRC. The countries of their origin are not parties to the ongoing process and have no obligation to accept those declared illegal immigrants or their descendants. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 23,2019.

09 July, 2019

Unruly BJP supporters ruin Modi’s image


BRP Bhaskar


BJP supporters

BJP supporters celebrate their party's election victory in the 2019 general elections in India. File/Reuters

ince becoming the Prime Minister five years ago Narendra Modi has been involved in a tireless round of foreign travels to win friends for the country and for himself.

Just before this year’s election in which he led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a successive second term,

The time has come for the party to consider whether imprudent utterances of its leaders and unruly ways of its rank and file are not negating the goodwill the Prime Minister is earning for the country.

Last month the US State Department, in its annual International Religious Freedom report, said Hindu groups had used violence, intimidation and harassment against Muslims and Dalits to force a religion-based national identity.

It linked the acts of violence, reported from different parts of the country, to inflammatory speeches of some senior BJP leaders and to government policies which interfere with the religious beliefs and practices of some groups.

This was not the first time that the misdeeds of Hindu groups had invited criticism from abroad. In 2017, the US-based Pew Research Center, which surveyed conditions in 198 countries, ranked India the fourth worst in the world in religious intolerance, after Syria, Nigeria and Iraq.

Last July, after 33 reported deaths in 70 mob attacks, the New York Times dubbed 2018 the Year of the Lynch Mob in PM Modi’s India. The critical remarks in the US official report upset the Modi establishment. Both the government and the party came up with responses, which were rather peevish. Neither was able to refute the contents of the report.

The External Affairs Ministry rejected the report. This made little sense since the report was a public document issued under a US Congressional mandate and not a communication addressed to the Indian government.

The Ministry said no foreign country had the right to criticise India’s record, overlooking the fact that the concept of sovereignty does not preclude nations from taking note of violations of human rights within each other’s borders. What’s more, external agencies often base their criticism primarily on reports originating from within a country.

Earlier this year Aakar Patel, Executive Director of the India chapter of Amnesty International, said his organisation had recorded a disturbing number of hate crimes against marginalised groups in 2018. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, in her annual report released later, wrote: “We are receiving reports that indicate increasing harassment and targeting of minorities – in particular Muslims and people from historically disadvantaged groups, such as Dalits and Adivasis.” She added that narrow political agendas were marginalising vulnerable people in an already unequal society and warned that divisive policies could undermine India’s economic growth.

The BJP’s response to the US report came from its media head Anil Baluni, MP, and was essentially a public relations exercise. He did not deny the reported cases of hate crime. He merely offered an alternative narrative.

Ignoring the US report’s references to mob attacks in the wake of rumours about beef eating and killing of cows, Baluni said most of the violent incidents were the result of local disputes and the perpetrators were people with criminal mindsets.

Whatever the motive behind the attacks, the assailants betrayed communal disposition in forcing the victims to shout slogans hailing a Hindu god. Sidestepping the charge about inflammatory speeches of BJP leaders, Baluni said the party was proud of its record in uplifting the living standards of all poor, underprivileged sections of the society, irrespective of faith and gender.

He asserted that the basic presumption in the US report that there was a grand design behind the anti-minority violence was false and added India had deep-rooted democratic institutions, including a fiercely independent and pro-active judiciary which was quite capable of handling such disputes and punishing the guilty.

This is a theoretical formulation which needs to be paired with the partisan role of the police, which have a critical role in the justice system. There have been instances of cops braving lynch mobs and rescuing the victims but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

Instances of the BJP rewarding pedlars of hate are far too many for the party to carry conviction on its professed faith in the principle of inclusive development.

The Prime Minister must rein in his belligerent supporters, in his own interest, before they cause more damage.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 9, 2019.


02 July, 2019

Leaderless Congress in India gropes in the dark


BRP Bhaskar

Rahul-Gandhi-750
Rahul Gandhi

More than a month after Congress President Rahul Gandhi offered his resignation, accepting moral responsibility for the party’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha elections, it remains leaderless. Although Gandhi turned down appeals to withdraw his resignation, efforts are still on to persuade him to stay on.

Some party leaders have mooted the idea of retaining him as President and appointing a Working President to hold the fort until he is ready to resume work. They have also proposed some names for the post but no consensus has emerged.

The Working President concept is one which parties in India have invoked from time to time. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi inducted party chief Amit Shah into the Cabinet as Home Minister the Bharatiya Janata Party has gone in for a Working President to reduce the burden on him.

The Congress leadership appears to be oblivious of the damage being caused by the inordinate delay in filling the vacuum at the top.  There is demoralisation at all levels in the party and it will not end until someone who can inspire workers at the grassroots level is in charge.

The next parliamentary elections are due only in 2024. But there is a lot to do for the party to redeem itself and perform well next time. The leaderless party is groping in the dark. It has not been able to assess the causes of the poll debacle let alone chart a next course of action.  

The BJP against which it is pitted is battle-ready at all times. Its strength lies in the cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh  who can be deployed anywhere any time.

The BJP commands far more resources than the Congress. It is known to have used the services of several thousand paid workers in its successful campaign to seize power in the eastern state of Tripura, which was ruled by the cadre-based Communist Party of India (Marxist) continuously for a quarter century. 

To take on the BJP the Congress needs to strengthen its organisational base.  When the party split in 1969, Indira Gandhi attracted a majority of the party’s rank and file, but in most states the organisation remained in the hands of leaders ranged against her.

Instead of building a new organisational network, she worked with handpicked state leaders, who derived strength from their proximity to her, and not from popular support.  Her successors also failed to remedy the organisational weakness. 

Over the years, the Congress’s base shrank as parties which articulated identity politics weaned away different caste and religious groups. While the BJP devised suitable strategies and overcame their challenge in the Hindi belt the Congress is yet to address the issue.  

Today the Congress party’s main weakness is the lack of a coherent ideology. It has gone as far as it could by cashing in on the goodwill it enjoyed as the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Clueless on the issue of ideology, the party’s old guard is seeking to mollify communally conditioned Hindus. Last week, Rajasthan’s Congress government registered a case against the sons of Pehlu Khan, who was lynched to death by a Hindutva mob two years ago, for cattle lifting. Anand Sharma, Deputy Leader of the Congress party in the Rajya Sabha, has said that the party lost the elections because of the surge of nationalist sentiments.

Rahul Gandhi had survived the early Hindutva onslaught in the social media and emerged as Modi’s most powerful challenger before the Lok Sabha polls. The big mistake he made was to give the party’s old guard a big say in determining the poll strategy in the Hindi belt.

The soft Hindutva line which the old guard is pushing betrays ideological pauperism. If the Congress cannot stand up for secularism, it has no reason to exist. The battle for secularism has to be fought not in the social media but where lynch mobs are on a rampage.  So far Congressmen have not reached out to the victims even in states where their party is in power.

The Congress must learn some lessons from its own history.  During the bloody days of the Partition riots Nehru kept the communal forces at bay not by pandering to majoritarian sentiments but by taking them head-on.

“Success often goes to those who dare and act,” Nehru said. “It seldom goes to the timid.” These words which inspired earlier generations are still relevant. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 2, 2019.