*** Just when Indians of the NE were settling down to bask in the
warmth of India's arrival as illuminated by CWG, they drop THIS! Is it just bad
timing or
a bitter truth that would not be wished away :-)?
cm
No Indian citizens in Assam?
WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
On Tuesday, I was given a 34-page document entitled “Resident Identity Card
(RIC) & Citizen Identity Card (CIC)—Ensuring Protection to India by a Virtual
Fence” authored by S.S.Meenakshi Sundaram, IAS, Deputy Commissioner, Udalguri
by the writer himself at our first meeting at Mangaldoi. I had time only to
flip through the document at Mangaldoi, but even that was enough to set the
alarm bells ringing loud and clear.
“RIC & CIC” (that is what I shall have to call the document from now on for the
sake of brevity) is clearly a feeler of sorts for the Union Home Ministry’s
plan to have two kinds of multipurpose personal identity cards for Indians—one
for the inhabitants of Assam alone and another for the rest of India—much on
the lines of infamous IM(DT) Act that the Supreme Court very rightly struck
down in 2005. This is again a mode of discriminating between the Indian
citizens living in Assam and those living in the rest of India solely because
the Government of India and Government of Assam have been unable to prevent
large-scale illegal immigration to Assam by East Pakistanis earlier and by
Bangladeshis since 1971. In fact, a far more accurate representation of facts
is that there has been blatant encouragement of illegal immigration from
Bangladesh during this decade and especially after the Supreme Court ruling on
the IM(DT) Act by the ruling party of the State. What Meenakshi Sundaram does
in Chapter 2 of his paper is to attempt a rationalization of illegal
immigration on the grounds that it is a universal phenomenon that is the
outcome of a “complex interplay of factors”. There is no denying that attempts
at illegal migration to more prosperous countries go on all over the world. Who
can forget how hard East Germans tried to cross the Berlin Wall and how many
lost their lives in the process? Mexicans and Cubans keep trying to enter the
United States all the time. But all self-respecting countries do everything
possible to prevent such illegal immigration. In other words, all
self-respecting nations must have immigration authorities that are like good
goal-keepers—preventing goals from being scored. It will not do to have deputy
commissioners who seek to legitimize illegal immigrations and remind us that it
takes place all over the world and then proceed to argue that two wrongs make a
right. In RIC & CIC we also have a favourite principle of Indian administration
working: the principle of fait accompli. It is like saying that what cannot be
cured (due to the inefficiency of the administration combined with the ruling
party’s greed for illegal votes) must be endured. It is as bad as saying that
if a rape cannot be avoided, the victim ought to shut her eyes and try to enjoy
it! Dwelling on the present situation of illegal immigration in Assam,
Meenakshi Sundaram refers to the attempts made to address the issue (page 3).
Among them he lists the Assam Accord, the infamous IM(DT) Act and the
Foreigners’ Tribunals, fencing of the Indo-Bangladesh boundary and the National
Register of Citizens (NRC). The Assam Accord is not law; the IM(DT) Act was
enacted with the express purpose of making it impossible to detect and deport
the illegal migrants, and the tribunals were all manned by retired and tired
judges; the fencing of the Indo-Bangladesh boundary has been a means of
benefiting contractors, and has not even begun properly so far; and the
updating of the NRC was cleverly side-stepped before the elections by
orchestrating a protest demonstration at Barpeta. He calls these attempts
“legal, above board, non-partisan and constitutionally valid attempts”. Not all
of them are even that. The Assam Accord is not law. Article 13(3)(a) of the
Indian Constitution should make this abundantly clear to the writer. The
infamous IM(DT) Act and the Foreigners’ Tribunals were introduced to actually
help the illegal migrants to remain in Assam without being troubled by the
district administration. In fact, anyone familiar with the Supreme Court’s
reasons for striking down this law should feel embarrassed even to mention it
as an immigration law.
On page 4 of his paper, Meenakshi Sundaram raises a question about immigration.
“When Indians seek to migrate to better pastures like USA and other developed
countries, why not the destitutes of our neighbourhood to India?” No one is
opposed to a certain amount of legal immigration. But being an overpopulated
country with a high density of population, India cannot afford even that.
Countries with a low density of population like the USA, Canada and Australia
can afford to have legal immigrants. The writer then gives four reasons why it
is difficult to identify illegal immigrants. They are: (a) the legal mechanisms
that we have are unable to identify the suspected (illegal migrant); (b) once
initiated, the legal mechanisms take a long time to complete; (c) there is no
way to detain the suspected (illegal immigrant) and in the bargain the
person(s) escape to a different location; (d) due to similarity of ethnicity,
language and culture which we share with the nationalities that surround us, it
is easy for the illegal immigrant to merge into the mainstream without much
difficulty. All these reasons (or excuses) are valid for almost all countries
of the world. Excuse (d) is the one that is most commonly cited by those who
are not competent enough to keep the illegal immigrant out. But language and
ethnicity are clearly different once the illegal migrants move a hundred
kilometers away from the border areas, which they often do. In any case, I can
think of even better examples—like the borders between France and Belgium,
Austria and Germany or the borders between Switzerland and its neighbouring
countries France, Germany and Italy. How can the nationals of these
neighbouring countries be distinguished? They are so much more alike. But they
are identified and treated like foreigners in all the neighbouring countries.
Likewise, Americans would be quite indistinguishable in Canada, but immigration
checks at the border are so stringent that no one travelling by road or train
escapes.
But the ruling party has given rise to a fait accompli in Assam by actually
encouraging the illegal immigration of Bangladeshis to Assam for illegal
electoral benefits, and now it does not know what to do. What is worse, the
Bangladeshi lobby is calling the shots in the administration of the State.
After all, they can pull down the State government in a matter of minutes. And
so, regardless of the provisions of the Indian Constitution, the Union Home
Ministry is being obliged to look for ways that will remove the difference
between the Indian citizens of Assam and those foreigners who are illegally
residing in the State. So there is this fantastic proposal of having special
identity cards for the residents of Assam—whether Indian citizens or
aliens—that will identify all of them only as residents and not as citizens.
Deputy Commissioner Meenakshi Sundaram posits the idea that whether it is the
Resident Identity Card for the inhabitants of Assam (including the Indian
citizens) and the illegal migrants referred to as residents or the Citizen
Identity Card for the rest of India, both cards will serve as a virtual fence
(an electronic one) that will prevent further illegal immigration to any part
of India. This is wishful thinking of a very fanciful order. After all, the
policemen and the BSF personnel who wink at the Bangladeshi coming into our
country illegally will not all be replaced by others overnight. So hordes of
Bangladeshis and other foreign nationals will continue to come in as before
without any documents, and no one will do anything about it. Having come in
they will just manage to get RICs like the ones distributed by the Government
of India made for them by other agencies. The net result will be a gross act of
discrimination against the indigenous people of Assam. They will get a fancy
new card called an RIC but they will simultaneously lose something they have
had for years. They will lose their Indian citizenship for no fault of their
own. They will have a card that just proclaims them as mere residents of India
when they have been citizens for years. A small percentage even has Indian
passports to prove this. For the indigenous people of Assam, the new RIC will
be an identification device that will take away their Indian citizenship. How
would Deputy Commissioner Meenakshi Sundaram react if someone had said that
since there are a large number of Sri Lankans in Tamil Nadu, the same
arrangement ought to be in force in that State as well. Besides, there are
several Indian States where a similar situation prevails even in respect of
Bangladeshis. What about West Bengal? It probably has even more Bangladeshi
infiltrators than Assam does. Is the Union Home Ministry going to give RICs to
Indian citizens of West Bengal as well? If not, why not? This is a matter that
needs to be challenged in the Supreme Court the day Resident Identity Cards are
issued to Indian citizens in Assam in place of Citizen Identity Cards. The
Constitution of India does not provide any means of punishing Indian citizens
in any part of the country by empowering the government of the day to take away
their citizenship merely because the government has got itself into a situation
where it cannot distinguish between the citizen and the alien.
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