Illegal migrants living inside India is a reality dating back to the 1950s, especially in several border states. Over decades, successive governments of different political hues have amended the citizenship law and rules multiple times to identify illegal migrants. A National Population Register (NPR) to form the basis of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the government’s most recently proposed tool.
The Supreme Court-monitored NRC process in Assam took five years, was completed on August 31, 2019, and cost ₹1,220 crore. It found 1.9 million people — 6% of the 32.9 million who applied to be recognised as citizens — unable to prove their citizenship for want of documents acceptable to officials.
Of the 1.9 million “illegal migrants”, over 60% turned out to be Hindus. Not unexpectedly, within 100 days, the government introduced the CAA-2019 Bill. It was passed into law on December 12, 2019, and government declared its intention to carry out country-wide NPR-NRC.
According to NPR-NRC-CAA read together, illegal migrants – persons whose names are excluded from NRC – will be consigned to Detention Centres. However, the CAA provides illegal migrants an opportunity to get Indian citizenship if, even while in detention, each can provide documents to prove their:
1. Citizenship of Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, and
2. Religion as Hindu/Sikh/Buddhist/Jain/ Parsi/Christian, and
3. Entry into India on/before December 31, 2014, and having lived inside India for five years.
This provides opportunity for corrupt middlemen to produce for people excluded from the NRC these three documents of “proof” to satisfy officials, and a fresh impetus to the fake-document industry. The three conditions of CAA ensure that every individual in a Detention Centre will remain there if he/she is Muslim or is not from an Islamic country.
The fears over NPR-NRC followed by CAA do not concern only Muslims, but every one of us 1.4 billion Indians. We will each need to prove our citizenship with prescribed documentation. The government’s ham-fisted response to massive country-wide protests against CAA gained wide media attention.
These fears are presently overshadowed by the brutal Covid pandemic-caused national tragedy of deaths and personal suffering, combined with economic body-blows to millions of families and the nation.
In the midst of this, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced his intention to re-do Assam’s NRC. This has re-kindled fears not only in Assam but also country-wide, of each individual having to suffer the personally traumatic, socially disruptive, and economically debilitating, process of proving citizenship with documentation.
There are also national security implications of hostile neighbours taking advantage of reduced army presence on the borders due to additional troops deployed for internal security duties, to handle potential social unrest caused by country-wide NPR-NRC implementation.
It is therefore necessary to re-visit the wisdom of the Rules governing NPR-NRC. NPR is created according to the “Instruction Manual for Updation of National Population Register, 2020,” and NRC is prepared according to Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003.
These Rules require local government officials to collate and compile data, verify it for the population of their jurisdiction, and handle related appeals and complaints – all in addition to their normal duties. The cost of Assam’s one-time NPR-NRC (Rs 1,220 crore-5 years) does not reveal the inevitable governance-deficit due to officials neglecting their normal duties.
Assam’s NPR-NRC experience reveals that lakhs of people made multiple visits to distant towns, depleting scarce personal finances for travel-stay-food-miscellaneous expenses, and losing income due to absence from occupation/job. Their suffering in personal, social and financial-economic terms, disrupted lives and exacerbated existing socio-economic insecurity.
Furthermore, since population is a dynamic entity, NPR-NRC will need continual/periodic updation, and budgetary support. It will increase work-load on local officials, already overloaded with essential deployment for state and general elections and Census-taking, exacerbating the existing governance-deficit situation.
Undeniably, large numbers of people are illegal migrants. They must certainly be identified and dealt with according to law. Nobody claims that this is easily done. However, NPR-NRC will put India’s entire 1.4 billion population to untold trouble, misery, expense and loss, to have one’s name included in NRC, all with the aim to identify a few million, at most, who are illegal immigrants.
NPR-NRC is as illogical as a police official summoning the entire population of the mohalla to the station to prove their innocence regarding an illegality committed in that mohalla, in order to find the culprit, who may still go undetected.
Rather than solving the illegal migrant problem, NPR-NRC followed by CAA for 28 states and eight UTs, will impose unbearable individual and national socio-economic costs. The already floundering pandemic-struck economy may well go beyond resuscitation.
Several cases questioning the constitutionality of CAA were filed in the Supreme Court. At the March 2020 hearing, the court rightly ruled that it needs to hear the government before taking a decision. Expectedly, the government remains in no hurry to present its defence, and inexplicably the court did not see fit to give the government a date. Hopefully, the new judicial atmosphere will expedite adjudication on this matter of huge national importance.
NPR-NRC is designed to identify persons for enforcement of CAA, the constitutionality of which is sub-judice. Implementing NPR-NRC will have deleterious social, economic and security effects, which will haunt our country for decades. However, fortunately, country-wide implementation of NPR-NRC, which was to begin on April 1 last year, was stymied by the pandemic.
NPR-NRC will be socially disruptive, unconscionably expensive, and illogical. Governments, endowed with administrative organisation, public finance, intelligence capacity, police, etc., have both the onus and the means to proactively detect illegal immigrants and deal with them under due process of law. But NPR-NRC is regressive and harmful, and deserves to be withdrawn.
Ominous future
Illegal immigration into India since Independence and especially following the early 1970s was caused by adverse social-economic-political circumstances obtaining in neighbouring countries.
The rise in sea levels due to Global Warming is already affecting populations in low-lying coastal areas. It is likely to cause massive environmental migration from neighbouring countries and magnify our socio-economic problems. Central and state governments would be wise to rise above petty politics and majoritarian nationalism to strategise for this in consultation with experts, in the public interest.
(The writer focuses on development and strategy)
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