 Looking at the Citizenship Amendment Bill which went on to become the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, the unhappiness that so many of us have felt that the protests on the street against the CAA have boiled down to one fact that citizenship is being linked with religion. So here there is a question of citizenship but there is also the question of a rational refugee policy. Would you like to talk about what are the rational egalitarian processes we should have for people to become citizens? Well let me address the second question first. I think it's pretty obvious that a rational refugee policy means that we claim to be a society in which anyone who's persecuted in our neighboring countries can seek asylum. It's another matter, you know, the process of seeking asylum and so on but it should be open. There should be absolutely no conditions attached to the identity of the person who's seeking asylum. If they can prove that they have been persecuted they can claim... Religion or nationality. Or nationality. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you know once you start this identity business of religion and which country they're coming from, the next will be ethnicity, the next will be occupation, you can bring in all kinds of identities and that is really not how it has worked anywhere else and it cannot work here. I have another problem with CAA and that is that I think that essentially, in fact I have many problems which I think need to be discussed which haven't always been discussed in full detail. One of them is that the way in which these new laws CAA, NRC, NPR, the alphabetical laws have been introduced, it is also underlining and supporting the idea of Hindu Rashtra. Now what do I mean by this? The foundational principles of the Hindu Rashtra consist of Pitri Bhumi, Punya Bhumi. Pitri Bhumi is the land of your ancestors which has to be the boundaries of British India, presumably British India. We don't know which boundaries they're talking about but we presume it's British India. Punya Bhumi is that your religion has to have originated within those boundaries. Now the emphasis that is being given to, you have to produce documents to prove where you were born, when you were born and who your parents were. This is Pitri Bhumi and Punya Bhumi. This is what the NPR, the National Population Register, is attempting. The Pitri Bhumi is your ancestors, your parents, where were they born and who were they and Punya Bhumi is your religion and the territory where you were born. So territory becomes a very important issue and I see this as a kind of step towards establishing what, you know, the ideology of those currently in power is to establish a Hindu Rashtra. I mean they make no bones about it. So I see this not only as an attack on citizenship but also a subtle way of bringing in their own ideas about how to establish a Hindu Rashtra. This is one way of doing that. Romina, with all the protests that we've seen across India, people on the streets, women on the streets, students on the streets, we've had a certain sort of response, official response, which again goes back to what you were talking about, the changing the distortion of the relationship between the state and the citizen in present day India. Would you like to talk about that? Because we've seen a completely out-of-proportion, undemocratic kind of response, whether it's violence, whether it's detention, section 144th edition, NSA on and on. Yes, I think in some ways I would say that this is almost predictable, that when there is so much confusion on the part of the authority as to how to implement a particular set of laws, there is bound to be differences of opinion in implementation and procedures, differences that might and logically might lead to rather high-handed, you know, actions of detaining people and arresting people and that kind of thing. I'll tell you what worries me about the way in which the situation is moving at the moment. First of all, I think it's conducive to a lot of corruption. The man without documents who's lost because his entire family has no documents. This is now what we're talking about. Largely people who are impoverished will go to the presiding officer and say, I have no documents. Now we all know from the way in which administration functions that one of the easiest solutions is, right, you pay me under the counter, I'll give you the documents and this will become a system and I can see possibly a lot of documents being forged for a price. And this is worrying because in a sense you're not opposing the system of passing these kinds of laws but you're introducing another element of corruption into the functioning of these laws. That's one possibility that could happen. I'm not saying that it will happen but it could happen and given the way in which many laws are treated in this country, it may well happen that there will be this corruption. Secondly, what is frightening and it's particularly frightening from the way in which protests are treated and for example what has been going on in Delhi is that are we developing into a surveillance state? It's now got to the point I think that most people would say the police is no longer protecting the citizen which is what it is supposed to do. It is in fact on the side of authority and is challenging and threatening the citizen. So the ordinary citizen is not going to run to the police for protection but it's going to run away from the police. This I think is a very critical situation. There will be nobody left in society whom the ordinary citizen can go to and say please protect me. I am being harassed, I'm being threatened, I'm being almost killed. Then you have a system which has already started which is that those in the law and order section of society will simply listen to those in authority and carry out their orders which means that the actual substance and the need for having people maintaining law and order will disappear because there will be no law and order. But law and order also gets used very often in all kinds of ways. So what you mean by law and order may not be what the person on the street sitting there again I think that for example people saying that the problem in the Delhi situation and the last two days is one of law and order is really frankly unacceptable to me because it's not law and order. It is very definitely one group of people wishing to attack another group of people for very obvious reasons. No, what I mean is that the people one resorts to for bringing law and order will no longer do so and this is repeatedly shown in the last few months. The police will attack universities as they did in Jamia and in Aligarh. The police will just sit by and watch a university being attacked as happened in JNU. That's not maintaining law and order and really the force with which people are attacked even with lattes makes one shudder that are these the people that are supposed to be protecting the citizen. This disturbs me. This disturbs me very much because I think that now as a citizen one is left with no protection. Again we were talking about this process of reducing the citizen to a subject which is distorting the relationship we have with the state in a constitutional democracy. We are no longer allowed to speak up. So I know that freedom of speech is we are always referred to the qualification there saying that as long as it does not interfere with national security and so on and so forth. But look at the way sedition is being used for example. Yeah, the sedition I think has never been so many seditious citizens before in our history perhaps. And I think sedition is something that perhaps we should have got rid of immediately after independence because it's a very dicey situation where people can use it. Part of decolonizing ourselves. Part of decolonizing ourselves. But nevertheless if even if we got rid of it determined authority will bring back something of that kind. There's been some talk about the boycott of the officers that come around getting information. This in a sense is suggestive to me as it is to a couple of other people I've talked to. It recalls a civil disobedience movement of Gandhi. That if you wish to take a position against a particular law be it the manufacture of salt do it by saying as a citizen I have the right to do this you can't stop me. So as a citizen I have the right to say that I will not give you this information if I choose not to do what you like. But then you must also ensure that these wretched detention centers are closed down or are converted into schools and hospitals or whatever if they're already built as many of them are. I mean that's another terrible blot on Indian society that you have detention centers for citizens. It's unheard of. Why because they can't produce documents.