New Citizenship Bill is about ethnicity, not religion

Finally, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the most important leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the North East, has come straight out on the Citizenship Amendment Bill. It cannot be "secular’’, he said, as it intends to give citizenship to the all the “persecuted” religious minorities of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. In these countries, he argued, Muslims cannot be persecuted on religious ground, for these are Islamic countries.

But not all are convinced. The list includes the Congress, Trinamool Congress, RJD, SP, DMK and the communists. Shashi Tharoor of the Congress has dubbed the Bill as “fundamentally unconstitutional.” The Opposition suggested the inclusion of Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka in the Bill to provide for Muslims there and thereby broaden the scope of what constitutes ‘persecuted minorities’. But the Narendra Modi government rejected the suggestion. Government sources say the Bill has been vetted by eminent lawyers, and they are confident it will cross all legal hurdles.

Perhaps the government is right. The Opposition, obsessed with secularism, has lost the plot.

The Bill will have certain fallouts that need to be understood. With the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, the vociferous protest to NRC will become meaningless. Because, then onwards, all inhabitant of India will automatically become registered as Indians, with one major exception: The Bengali-speaking Muslims.

No one is going to question the Indian-ness of a Kashmiri Muslim, of a Rajasthani Muslim, of a Gujarati Muslim, of any South Indian Muslim, or even Hindi-speaking Muslims. Only Bengali-speaking Muslims will become suspect all over India, and will have to provide their bona fide citizenship.

It was so even in its earlier avatar that was passed in the Lok Sabha, but failed to cross the hurdle of the Rajya Sabha in the last Parliament.

But the new, amended Bill that is likely to be placed in the Lok Sabha on December 9 has not spared some of the Bengali-speaking Hindus either. To keep its support base in the North East intact, the BJP government has exempted a vast area (the states under Inner Line permit, and those which come under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution) of the North East from the purview of the proposed new act. The exemption will be applicable to sizeable parts of Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and the entire Arunachal, Mizoram and Nagaland. So, the Bangladeshi Hindus living in these areas will not become citizens of India as refugees. They will have to leave their hearth and home and move to other parts of India to gain the benefit of the Bill.

So, the new Bill is not about religion. Religion is just a facade. It is about ethnicity.

It should be pointed out here, in unequivocal terms, that the concerns of the inhabitants of the North East (who were opposed to granting citizenship to Bangladeshi Hindus), were more than genuine. The influx of Bengali-speaking people since 1947 has disturbed the fragile social equilibrium of these tribal areas. Tripura is a state where the original inhabitants, the Tipra community, have been reduced to one-fourth of the population, while the Bengali population is more than 63 per cent. In Assam, the Assamese community is 48 per cent of the population while the Bengalis are 29 per cent. It is said that many Bengali-speaking Muslims have recorded themselves as Assamese-speaking people to avoid trouble. Otherwise, the gap between the two could have been lesser than 19 per cent. So, all other communities of the region living in other states have turned sensitive about Bengalis too.

Such complexities have characterised Indian civilisation for many thousands of years, and have grown more complex since the Partition of the land on religious lines. While post-Partition demographic problems have been largely settled along the western border of India, except in Kashmir, the problem was never settled on the eastern side around what was then East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh).

The new Citizenship Amendment Bill is an attempt to settle, once and for all, the problem in the East/North East by giving citizenship to Hindus from Bangladesh (as a persecuted minority) and identifying the Muslims from Bangladesh as infiltrators. So, the Bill is not about communalism, it is about the ethnic Bengali-speaking people.

So, ultimately only two categories of people, Bengali Muslims of India and Bangladeshi Hindus residing in the North East, will face hardship due to the amendments in the Citizenship Act.

When the updating of the NRC will be taken up, the Bengali-speaking Indian Muslim will have a harrowing time to prove they have lived in India from before 1947. Unfortunately, over the last fifty years, millions of Bangladeshi Muslims entered India by bribing the BSF, and the respective regimes in Bengal, Assam and Tripura provided them with ration cards. Now, the Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims will have to pay the price for it. They have not failed the nation; the nation (in the form of the BSF and various political parties) has failed them. But who cares?

There is nothing wrong in giving shelter to the people of neighbouring countries persecuted for their religion. The Bill itself is not un-secular, for it opens doors not only for the Hindus and not only for the dharmic religions that originated in this country (Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism), but also to the Christians. The problem is not the Bill itself, but the consequences which will arise when the updating of NRC will be taken up.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a Kolkata-based journalist and author of books including, A Naxal Story. He is a deputy editor at the Bengali daily, Aajkal)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.