 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. On December 9th and 11th, the two houses of Indian Parliament passed the very controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019. Now what this bill does is give six religious communities – Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains and Buddhists – and refugees from these communities exemption from the status of illegal migrant if they arrived in India before December 31st 2014. Now this bill explicitly does not include the Muslim community and thus introduces a religious component to the application for citizenship in India which has never happened before. This process is also connected to the concept of the National Registry of Citizens which would involve verifying the citizenship of those living in India. To talk more about these issues, we have with us Prabir Purghasa. Hello Prabir. Prabir, so the government is pointing out that this is a humanitarian move, that members of these six religious communities who are persecuted in three countries – that is Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan – will get safe haven in India. So it's being placed as some sort of symbol of India's compassion and humanity. So how do you respond to this claim? You know, first is that you've created a problem where none existed. Nobody has said that people from these countries or any other country for the matters cannot get refused in India. Therefore the real issue is why do you need this Citizens Amendment Bill today? And that has happened because in Assam, particularly in northeast of which Assam is a part, that there was what is called the National Registry of Citizens that is being attempted, which had this idea that we will identify those who are citizens and those who are not citizens and have come from Bangladesh. Now that was basically the issue which is now being sought to be extended to all over India. The threat that has been held out repeatedly that we'll have a National Registry of Citizens. So you are going to ask people to prove they are citizens. Now the Assam process saw that about 190,000 people – 1.9 million, sorry – the Assam process saw or the northeast process saw Assam being the major state there, there are 1.9 million people were found to not have enough documentary evidence they are citizens of India. So they became quote-unquote non-citizens. What will happen to them? A small section of them are lodged in detention camps and some of them have been there for now five years. So are we going to do that to nearly 2 million people? Is that the proposal? So who are they? A lot of them are actually found to be not Muslims, the one who really are the targets of the ruling government. They are found to be also other communities including the largest numbers probably being actually Hindus. So therefore the Citizens Amendment Bill that everybody else will get citizens except the Muslims. Now I think the bigger issue is that the Citizens Amendment Bill therefore is something which tries to then take into account that you will start a citizenship process by which people who are already in India will have to prove they are citizens. So the first time we are being asked to prove that we are indeed citizens and there is a whole lot of things that go behind that but essentially it is not the task of the Indian government to say that you are an illegal immigrant. It is my task to show that I am not an illegal immigrant. Therefore I am a legal bona fide citizen of India. Therefore the reversal of proof is taking place and since the reversal of proof in a country which we have to show you are a citizen by 1971, the bulk of India's population is born after 71. So they have to show the parents were citizens before they had been in India before 71. So all of this in a country where 80% of the people really do not have proper documentation and particularly if you take older people it would also mean that a huge number of people will not be able to prove their citizens. So then the argument is don't worry if you are not a Muslim it would affect you because retrospectively we will give you citizenship under the citizen's amendment bill. Of course then since I don't have papers I would have to then show that I came from these three countries and I would also have to show that I was a refugee and I was persecuted over there and then claims citizenship. So if I can't even find papers to prove that I was here in 71 or my parents were here before 71, what chance do I have to show that I was in one of the three countries and I came seeking citizenship? Who is keeping these papers 60, 70 years after you have arrived if you did arrive even as a refugee? So I think this whole process comes from this idea of citizen and non-citizen not on the basis of the territorial limits within which you live but based on what your identity is, are you a Muslim? Are you a Hindu? And essentially this citizenship based on identity not on the country border within which you live is as we know is familiar. This is what Nazi Germany did. This in fact is even older if you see for instance in the United States where the African-American community were supposed to be freed from slavery but under segregation lost most of their rights and including voting rights. So the segregation, the Nazi Germany are all examples of what happens when a certain set of people are declared non-citizens in different ways and I think what you see is really coming from that mindset. However stupid that mindset is in the kind of plans it is doing but I don't think this is even a workable proposition even if the intention is fascist which probably it is but even doing this is it doesn't seem to be an exercise which makes any kind of sense except dividing the country and country going up in flames which we now see in the Northeast. And experts have pointed out that the economic costs of such a national registry of citizens would be even larger than the country's education and health budgets or for that matter even the defence budget. But one of the key issues here basically is that the government is going all out to declare that Muslim citizens of India don't have to worry and this is not an attempt to strip them of citizenship. But what is the kind of message that is implicitly being conveyed to the Muslim community especially Muslim community of India especially with this bill? You know people are not fools this assumption that they can be fooled again and again is the Waterloo shall we say of rulers. The rulers believe people are fools and if you lie to them again and again the bigger the lie and we have the famous exponent of that who said if you lie big and if you lie enough and the people are fools. Now unfortunately people are not and the fact that the CB has produced this kind of reaction what exactly what would not have happened if it was to only see the letter of the law. That makes clear that whether it's liberal sections of Indian population it's the minority communities also common people are realising that this is a path of a much larger agenda and this talk about nothing to fear I'm sure Hitler would have said it a number of times also before he came to power. So I'm sure that you know the liberal American establishment the US establishment all talks about remember that you have people have full rights except for the colour of your skin or if you're a woman. So all of these are if we should not take them as face value people have understood why when this is going to so it's quite it's quite heartening at one level to see the reaction we are seeing on the ground that on the ground this talk of the government of the Home Minister the Prime Minister the leaders of this government the BJP government none of this is really cutting much ice people have already made up their mind that this is segregation it is to divest people of the citizenship it is directed at the minority community and the irrespective of the cost of this this government is doing it because they still believe in the two nation theory that Muslims of one nation the Hindus should have a Hindu nation this is where it's really coming from as you know apart from the Christians this kind of Hindu identity based politics which we call Hindutva in India this Hindu supremacist kind of policies regard six Buddhists Jains as also as Hindus so Christians they have been little more lax because they think you have need to make up with America and so on so the US being a Christian nation which of course the the constitution may not say so but in practice it is seen to be one that therefore we should go really soft on the Christians anyway Christians are the small section in the Indian population so the target is really Muslims and all sections of the Indian people understand it BJP's game plan is because it's anti-Muslim and people know it is therefore they will do the World Bank mobilization that the Hindus rally behind them based on the fact that they are going to isolate the Muslims and they will I don't know whether they will how they plan to deal with the number of people who will be declared non-citizens out of it because apart from the cost you know the NRC took 20 years before it even came to fruition in one state in one state you're going to do it across the country and that scale even apart from the huge cost that will incur the process is going to tear apart the social framework of this country for 20 to 30 years all the people will focusing on citizenship and that is a road which as I said people have understood BJP's miscalculation is it thinks that it can really get the Hindu masses behind them because both sides understand the direction of where this is going so I think that's the calculation they have. So basically the BJP's game plan is to create the and it's already doing that of course is to sort of create a frenzy around the outsider who's infiltrated your country and use that to sort of polarize people especially and force them to maybe ignore the economic problems that are going around the kind of social fractures that are happening and the inability of the country to actually progress materially. But we do see one thing that the BJP government and the far right Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was elected in 2014 came back with a stronger majority in 2019 and one of the promises was the Citizenship Amendment Bill and after coming to power for a second time it's been Hindutva and steroids. There's been a number of policies which have actually reiterated that direction we've been talking about. So what do you see as the possibilities for resistance at a time when at least electoral results seem to indicate that this strategy may be working. See let's also start calling it what it is. It's Hindu supremacists. This is what this politics is all about and this is what you called Hindutva or steroids. Now you know the question that all of us have to think it is not that this policy will lead to a failure in the sense that people will desert the policy, people will turn against the policy. I think it's already turning to happen but let's take the best case scenario for Hindu supremacists and that would be that we fracture the country. Now if we fracture the country of the lines that the BJP thinks it will fracture, Hindus on one side and the Muslims on the other and therefore they will gain the World Bank politics advantage that they are seeking. What it doesn't realize is that India has many more fractures. It is ethnic fractures as we are seeing in the northeast. It is fractures of other kinds of identities apart from religious identities, linguistic identities. It has even sub-national identities or we could call it supra-linguistic identities like double identity for instance. So all of these identities will also or can also surface. So what you would get is really in India fractured on multiple lines. And I am very, very hopeful that CAB NRC process is going to test the Indian national fabric. What metal we have as citizens of this country? What is the constitution we have? What are the constitutional values we have? But I think Indian citizens will take to the streets or use other forms by which they will defeat this kind of rupture that the BJP government is making. I think that we are actually facing a different turning point that today and that turning point will crystallize with this attempt to call for two kinds of citizenship on Indian people. One who are really fully citizens, others who are citizens by sufferance or non-citizens. Thank you so much Rubir. That is all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.