Students are showing the way to resist the CAA-NRC design

IT took the Modi-Shah government less than three days to turn the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 into an Act. It has the numbers in Lok Sabha and in Rajya Sabha where the NDA does not have the numbers, it managed to cobble majority thanks to the positions taken by non-NDA parties like BJD, YSRCP, TDP. But the opposition to this latest surgical strike on the Constitution keeps growing on the streets as India understands the implications of the amendment and witnesses the war the government has launched on students and other sections of protesting people across the country. Assam, where the protests have been most intense and massive, has already lost five young people - Dipanjal Das, Sam Stafford, Dwijendra Panjing, Iswar Nayak and Abdul Alim - to police firing while several students have been badly injured in campuses like Jamia and Aligarh.

Apart from unleashing brutal repression on the anti-CAA protests, the regime hopes to discredit and isolate the protesters by branding the legitimate popular unrest a 'jehadi-Maovadi' conspiracy against the government. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, herself an alumnus from JNU, used this description even as the whole country was shocked to see video clips of unauthorised police entry and unprovoked violence against Jamia students even inside the university library and toilets. Prime Minister Modi said the protesters could be identified by their clothes, clearly targeting the Muslim protesters and trying to give the whole thing a communal colour. But the student community has seen through this design and is rallying in wider protests in an inspiring demonstration of democratic solidarity.

The Sangh-BJP campaign around the CAA is based on a series of half truths and plain lies. The first big lie is to separate the CAA from the NRC and pretend that the CAA is all about 'giving' citizenship to deserving people and not taking it away from anyone and hence Indian Muslims had no reason to worry. The CAA, as Amit Shah himself has said on so many occasions, is the first preparatory step towards a countrywide NRC. The forthcoming NPR campaign and the ongoing construction of detention camps are also designed to facilitate and enforce an all India NRC. While the Sangh brigade tells Muslims not to fear being stripped of their citizenship, it actually invokes the CAA to reassure Hindus as though CAA was a blanket safeguard for all Hindus even if they found themselves excluded from the NRC!

Nothing could be more mischievous and untrue. CAA promises to grant citizenship only to non-Muslims who have migrated to India from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan before 31 December 2014 on grounds of religious persecution. Clearly it does not provide any insurance to people in most parts of India who will get excluded from the NRC because of the very nature of the exercise and the lack of documentation that marks the existence of the toiling masses who typically have no land and have to migrate in search of livelihood and women who move away to the houses of their in-laws after marriage. Such have been the majority of the people who got excluded in Assam where 1971 was treated as the cut-off year. It is not difficult to imagine the scale of exclusion in an all India NRC with 1951 as the base year. Even 3% error will take the number to a staggering 40 million. How many of these people will be rehabilitated as Indian citizens under the amended Citizenship Act is anybody's guess.

The truth is that CAA can be invoked to grant citizenship only to non-Muslim people who have migrated to India from these three countries and not to rehabilitate Indians who get excluded from the NRC for lack of supporting documents or for just bureaucratic bias or operational error. But to hide this reality the Modi government is trying to camouflage the CAA as a legal safeguard for people of minority communities suffering persecution in our Muslim dominated neighbouring countries. To build this narrative the Home Minister cited misleading figures in Parliament. He said the ratio of Hindu population in Pakistan had dropped from 23% in 1947 to 3% at present. This is a big lie. There are no detailed population figures for 1947, we can get our figures only from the first post-1947 census which was donv in 1951. And in 1951, the ratio of Hindus in West Pakistan was only around 3% and today, if anything, it shows a slight increase! 23% was the ratio of non-Muslims in the eastern part of Pakistan in 1951, and today it has dropped, not to 3%, but to a little less than 10% level. This decline is certainly quite striking but much of it has happened before the birth of Bangladesh, and as a result of the insecurity and crisis caused by the liberation war and its aftermath. If the case is that Hindus have migrated in large numbers, thereby pushing the ratio of Hindus in Bangladesh, the government cannot simultaneously raise the bogey of massive infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims to India. In fact, the Assam NRC deflated the whole bogey of massive undocumented immigration from Bangladesh.

In the context of NRC, the Modi government told Bangladesh time and again not to worry as NRC was an 'internal' matter of India. Now to justify the CAA the same government is resting its case on the presumption of continued persecution of minorities in Bangladesh. All these years, Indian foreign policy has treated Bangladesh and Afghanistan as friendly countries, never putting them in the same bracket with Pakistan. Now the CAA narrative has done precisely that by clubbing Bangladesh and Afghanistan with Pakistan, painting them all as evil regimes where minorities are subjected to persecution. And this when the whole world is talking about the increasingly vulnerable state of Indian Muslims, the biggest of India's own minority communities. Regardless of whatever the Modi government may want us to believe about the NRC-CAA package, the whole world knows the truth. This is the Modi Government's war on India's Constitution which had promised equality among all citizens regardless of religious affiliation. This is the Sangh brigade's war on India.

The growing countrywide student solidarity following the brutal police attack on Jamia students has shown the way forward. Students of JNU, Delhi University and Ambedkar University all rushed to the Delhi Police Headquarters the same night to protest against the crackdown and now every university and institute of higher education is joining in. On 19 December, India will observe the 92nd anniversary of the shared martyrdom and shared legacy of three of India's brave freedom fighters - Ashfaqulla Khan, Ramprasad Bismil and Roshan Singh. It was Bismil who had immortalised the iconic song of India's freedom movement 'sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai, Dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil mein haii' (The desire for revolution is in our hearts, let us see what strength there is in the arms of our executioner') and inspired his successors like Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad. Today when the Sangh-BJP brigade is bent upon reigniting the worst prejudices and tragic divisions of the Partition days, we must resurrect the finest sentiments and values of our freedom Movement. Secular India must overcome the Sangh-BJP design of communal hatred and division, democracy must triumph over the looming shadow of fascist disaster.