 Hello, welcome to NewsClick. We have a guest with us, Surur Mandar. She is a human rights activist and a lawyer and she is here to talk about the NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Bill. What is the connection between these two issues? The Citizenship Bill has just been cleared in Lok Sabha. What is the impact going to be of this bill? Welcome to NewsClick. Thank you for having me. The first thing is do we have an immigration crisis in India because of which we need a Citizenship Amendment Bill of the kind we have. See, I strongly believe that we don't have a crisis of immigration. Why is that? Simply because if you just look at the numbers of Assam and where the issue of citizenship and illegal immigration is so high that even if we take the 19 million, 19 lakh number that has been floating around or we take the 40 million number that has been going the difference is about 6 to 11 percent and that's a very minor number in comparison to the large scale of the population. So it's not going to have a demographic effect. It doesn't have an effect on the electoral process. So why are we so helpent on talking about illegal immigration? Right. So why are we so helpent is what I wanted to know. This has been a gradual process from the 80s onwards we have tried to reform our citizenship law. What has been this process? Can you just take us through quickly? So see the first round of sort of changes happened after the Assam Accord where Section 6A was brought into the 1955 Citizenship Act. After that we had the most critical I think change which was the 2003 amendment brought in which says two things. One which was the more popular version was of course about PIO status and OCI cards for Indian origin people living across the globe. But the second thing that they brought in which is rarely discussed and is still pending in court on its validity is the question of the fact that they have said that any person born after 2004 has to prove that one of his parents is Indian and the other person is not an illegal immigrant. And that illegal immigrant is a loaded term. Who is going to decide it? How is it going to be decided? Where are we going to place them? And what happens to people after that? So the most interesting thing is that the way the Citizenship Act has been written says that you cannot get access to citizenship ever if any one of your parents is declared an illegal citizen. So imagine today somebody who is 15 or 16 if his or her parent is declared an illegal citizen. That means that he or she and her children and grandchildren and thereafter will never be able to apply for Indian Citizenship because one of their ancestors is an illegal immigrant. So the whole idea has been to squeeze the idea of who is a citizen and narrow it. What does the current bill actually do? What is the 2019 Citizenship? How does it change this narrative? So what it has done is brought in a proviso to the idea of who an illegal immigrant was. So till 2019 now an illegal immigrant was anybody who came in through illegal means into the country. So you may be persecuted, you may not be persecuted etc but if you have not followed due process to enter the country you will be considered an illegal immigrant. What the new bill does is that it differentiates people on the basis of religion and says that any person belonging to Hindu Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community belonging to any of these three countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan will not be considered an illegal immigrant. So what you are reading out is actually a part of the bill that has been passed by the Lok Sabha. Right. But the statements of object and reasons of this bill are slightly different. Yes so this is where as always this government plays dirty and that the object and reasons say persecuted communities and they said that these communities have faced persecution in these three countries but when it talks about the bill there is no mention in the act of persecution. So I don't have to prove that I am persecuted to enter simply by belonging to these communities I can enter. So why hasn't that privilege been given to the only left out community which is Muslims of India and the Muslims of these three countries who are also often persecuted. So let's talk about the exclusions. What is the what is the basis for making exclusions of many many people who are persecuted in India in the bordering parts of India and also related to this is a question of the persecuted minorities in India. What happens to them when this bill becomes comes in force. So the question is what has happened one of the big big sort of left out groups are Tamils who Hindu Tamils who are are living as refugees in Tamil Nadu for decades now and so why has Sri Lanka been left out. Why have we left out let's say persecuted communities like the Madheshi's in Nepal to access citizenship. Why have we left out the Rohingyas who the word is the knowledge of facing persecution but we are throwing the Rohingyas out actively but and are silent on the question of the Tamils but we are doing nothing and and which is what is extremely telling about where this government's mindset comes from. It is not it doesn't truly believe in the idea of the persecuted community. What it is doing is what it is accusing the rest of the world of doing is appeasement politics. It is to appease the Hindi heartland that we are caring for the mythical persecuted Hindu Sikh from Pakistan Afghanistan but the fact of the matter is that it are they and to what extent and do they actually want to be want to enter this country. Do we know how many illegal immigrants live in India do we know I don't think the government has ever done an analysis of that kind of information but so there is no legal basis to actually go ahead with the bill if there is no even semi empirical data backing it up. We have the experience of the NRC in Assam and see the NRC in Assam has put out about they are saying 19.25 lakh Indians people people are not Indians see the NRC also the one clarity in that NRC doesn't declare you a foreigner it declares you non-citizen all that the NRC process proves is that you do not have the requisite documents to prove your citizenship it doesn't say that you are an illegal immigrant or you're not of Indian but if you let's say are able at a later stage to prove it through due process let's say if there is a error in document or an error in fact you can go to court and you will get your citizenship back so it doesn't deny you citizenship what it does is saying you haven't done enough to prove your citizenship. And there's also connection between what is being told will happen in India the national NRC and the citizenship bill wherein there is a conflict between who can become a citizen. Exactly see what does the NRC process say it is essentially saying that the state has clearly not done enough to ensure that there's clarity of documentation of Indians who are born or living in this country so you have to now come as a citizen and prove your citizenship to the state the question nobody is asking is what is the state done to ensure that my citizenship is correct or incorrect why was I let's say if I am an illegal immigrant how did I get access to a government document why do I have access to a voter card a pan card and adharkar that's not what they're saying so because you have not done your job now we have to as citizens go through turmoil and hardship to prove our citizenship and what this will do is essentially once you get excluded nobody knows what is going to happen because we don't know what the outcome is in a SAM but the least of it would be that you would lose your privileges and that's where this contradiction comes alive and it's truly heartbreaking that one set of people who are who belong to another country you are bringing them in and and protecting them right but your own citizens who are unable to prove their citizenship the state will not do anything to protect them but in fact will hound them will will make life difficult for them will declare them illegal and then will create a whole round or second class citizenship purely but other people from outside can come in and claim citizenship and get it and get protection of the state so what does the Indian constitution actually say about citizenship is there a direct definition of who is a citizen so when the constitution was written it said simply you can become a citizen by doing two things either you're born in the country your parents are Indians and the third is if you choose to be Indian but did it go did India go about proving citizenship no it was purely based on birth and that's the interesting thing that when in when the citizenship amendment has bills have been have come in 92 2003 the first lot of people don't even have to prove so if i'm born before 1987 i don't even have to prove that any of my parents were citizens i just have to prove that i was born in this country now even in that there are huge complications because we are not a country with 100 birth and death records right so how am i going to prove it we don't we are not a country with 100 clarity on land records so how do i prove ancestry what are you going to do with a whole bunch of lost citizens what are you going to do with orphan children what are you going to do with the homeless what are you going to do with nomadic tribes what are you going to do with women who lose access to citizenship so we are not addressing those questions and the most important and critical question as in as a citizen one should be asking why the state asking me to prove my citizenship when the what has the state provided to me and the most poor and marginalized have the most to lose in this nrc process why is that because they are the least likely to have any documentation that can prove a relationship to their past so you might have an adhaar card currently but adhaar does not prove ancestry so i have nothing to prove who i were who my parents were whether they were Indian citizens and secondly because i am poor i am usually a migrant community so i move from my village i may be a landless person there so what happens to me what happens to a woman who gets married changes her name and has no proof of pre-married documentation and will exist so all of these communities are going to lose out on the citizenship process and they are the ones who also lost out from the state to begin with they are the least educated they have the least access to public services public goods so i for me the question is that why should i bear the brunt of this vicious campaign to declare people illegal so when i've gained nothing from it right you know which makes me wonder what can you as a citizen or anyone do about this process which is unfolding there was a proposal on social media recently that you know all Indians should start declaring that they are Muslims and therefore sort of subvert the government's idea of excluding Indian Muslims there was also a proposal that there should be some sort of you know Muslims should try and court arrest there are murmurs that they should reject the nrc and the citizenship bill what what do you think which of these proposals appeals to you i think i think it's we shouldn't place the owners on the Muslims of the country i feel that the owners is on people like you and me who are literate educated people to ask the right questions and for us to court the arrest because this is our battle do you and i want our child to face the question of who his parents were and why because he's born in india or she's born in india and that's what makes her an indian citizen why should the conversation be about who her parents or grandparents were considering a lot of us have faced partition on both sides of the border is that a fight i want to have my grandmother's passport still says born in lahore and will will that make my my son insecure about his citizenship and do we want that so i feel that yes at some level declaring yourself a muslim is evocative but the larger battle has to be on the streets and it gandhi ji said this and he said this very clearly when you're fighting a just battle against an unjust law you have to do it through just means and the just mean is just not to be part of the system let's reject it if all of us reject it irrespective of caste gender identity and politics they will not be able to hold this to any credible good whatsoever and eventually it's not about muslims tomorrow they'll come after you and me based on our gender some some other time our minority status as sexual minorities who knows where this can lead to so if you don't stop it now we won't stop it ever all right thank you for joining us thank you thanks 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