Chicago – March 24, 2024
Citizenship has been defined as the right to have rights. Over the past six years, there have been clear political moves to fundamentally assault and redefine this Constitutional basis of both Indian nationhood and citizenship. Especially now, with the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 being passed and a not thoroughly debated all India-level NPR-National Register of Citizens (NRC) process.
NPR is the database on which policy is made. NRC is a process in which people are asked to prove their citizenship. There is no connection between the two processes, nor can they be used in each other’s survey. NPR data can never be used for NRC.
The NPR is the first step of the proposed NRC (or NRIC). The NPR seems similar to the Census, but it’s not. The NPR comes under the Citizenship Act 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, while the census is conducted under the Census Act, 1948.
The process of the NPR, which leads to the NRC is as follows:
- For the NPR, govt employees will go to every home, collecting all the names and other details of every person living in India, whether citizen or foreigner.
- Then they will sit in their office, look at the information collected and decide who all seem to be “doubtful citizens”.
- Such “doubtful citizens” will then be asked to produce documents to prove that they are citizens.
- Decisions will be made about which of these “doubtful citizens” qualify to be Indian citizens.
- A ‘National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC)’ will be prepared.
- Those whose names appear in this list will be given a National Citizenship card.
- If you don’t have the card, you are not an Indian citizen!
Muslims will not be able to prove their citizenship according to the new amendments, hence they will be considered foreigners in their own homeland. The CAA is fundamentally made to favor Hindus where by any foreign Hi du can also claim Indian citizenship easily.
WHY CAA IS CONSIDERED DISCRIMINATORY:
- CAA gives eligibility for Indian citizenship to illegal migrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians (i.e., non-Muslims) from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who reached India before 2015.
- CAA ignores persecuted minorities from other regions such as Tibet, Sri Lanka and Myanmar as well as Hazaras, Ahmadis, atheists and political dissenters, who face persecution in Pakistan.
- This act is the first instance of religion being used as a criterion for Indian citizenship. CAA violates Constitutional secular principles and is a violation of Articles 13, 14, 15, 16 and 21 which guarantee the right to equality, equality before the law and non-discriminatory treatment by the Indian State.
- CAA is about illegal migrants. Citizenship via naturalisation or registration is not available to illegal migrants. There is no way for a Muslim who is declared an ‘illegal migrant’ to get citizenship in India.
- Indian Muslims could be badly affected by CAA+NRC, because those Muslims who do not have the documents required to prove their citizenship in a nationwide NRC could be declared as illegal migrants and they would not be able to use CAA, like non-Muslim Indians perhaps could, to get citizenship by lying and claiming that they are illegal migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
