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.
