With an eye on the election

As expected, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill has set North East India on fire, with protests erupting across the region. 

The BJP’s main handler for the region, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, is prominent in defending the move to pass the bill. 

His arguments in favour of the Bill centres around the alleged threat posed to Assam’s politics by the growing population of Muslims. Sarma has repeatedly given press interviews since the Bill was passed listing 17 assembly constituencies that he claims would have gone to Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front in its absence. 

“These seats will now stay with the Assamese people”, he said, adding, “otherwise in a few years Ajmal would have taken oath as the Chief Minister of Assam”. 

The logic Sarma is offering is that there are around 8 lakh Hindu Bengalis from Bangladesh, who will be able to vote if this bill is passed, but be unable to vote without it. However, apart from the morality of Sarma’s reasoning, the logic too is questionable. 

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is still in the process of being drawn up, and in any case, the voters list is quite separate from the NRC. 

So firstly, there is no way for anyone to know at present how many Bengali Hindus might be out of the NRC when the entire process is complete – and that is going to take at least till June 30. 

Secondly, there is no connection as of now between the NRC and the voter list. Exclusion from the NRC will not automatically take away anyone’s voting rights. It is not clear who the bill is meant to benefit or why it confines itself only to easing the conditions for Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. 

There is no large-scale migration of people of these communities into India as a whole. There are refugee camps of Pakistani Hindus in Rajasthan and Gujarat and of Afghan Sikhs in Delhi. 

There are no such camps of recent vintage anywhere in Assam. The recent refugee camps that do exist in the state are in the Bodoland areas and the refugees are internally displaced people whose houses were destroyed in local communal riots.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee studying the bill in its report had mentioned that according to the Intelligence Bureau, there are 31,313 persons belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Parsi communities, who have been given long term visas on the basis of their claims of religious persecution. 

The IB Director is on record in the report as clarifying that only these 31,313 persons will be benefited. “There will be many others who might have come, and they might have already taken citizenship by various means.” 
“Tribunals are already there to identify if any of them has obtained it by fraudulent means. That is a different issue altogether”, the Director IB said. 

The Joint Secretary, R&AW, also deposed before the JPC, and said, “our only concern has been that the agencies who are inimical to us should not have a legal framework within which they can exploit our situation and infiltrate their own people into our country”. 

This is not quite a ringing endorsement of the Bill from the IB and R&AW.

The Passport (Entry into India) Rules were already amended in 2015, with the gazette notification published on September 7 of that year, by which persons belonging to the minority communities of Pakistan and Bangladesh who entered the country on or before December 31, 2014, had already been added to the list of those granted exemption from the penal provisions of the Rules. 

Even this amendment to the Rules was perhaps not required, since the Rules already contained provisions for the Central government to grant exemptions to “persons or classes of persons specified by general or special order”. 

If there is and was no large-scale migration of refugees from the minority communities of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan anytime in recent years, if only 31,313 persons are going to benefit from it, and if the Passport Rules had already been amended to save those who came before 2015 from penal action, what was the need for rushing the contentious Citizenship Bill through the Lok Sabha? 

Moreover, even by its own logic of providing a sanctuary for Hindus from the subcontinent, why are other neighbouring countries, such as Sri Lanka, not included? 

The Tamils of that country have faced war. The only logical answer that emerges is that the bill is a jumla. Faced with the prospect of going into the 2019 polls on the basis of its performance in the past four-and-a-half years, the government perhaps thought this issue, along with reservations for upper castes, would help it.  The bill has cleared the Lok Sabha, but is now in limbo, with the Rajya Sabha session having ended without it being cleared. There will be a Budget Session from January 31 to February 13. It is possible that the Bill may be brought before the Rajya Sabha then.

However, the BJP, even with the support of its National Democratic Alliance allies, lacks a majority in the Upper House. 

In fact, it is in the process of losing allies, because the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) has already walked out of the alliance over the bill, and there is opposition to it from other Northeast allies and even the Shiv Sena. 

It is likely that the Citizenship Bill will help hardly anyone in the end. 

Author is a journalist