NRC, the methodless madness: former IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan’s personal diary

After I resigned from the IAS, I had decided I would speak about the Kashmir clampdown. It was important for me to tell people why as Indians we should be concerned about what is happening in Kashmir, why we should stand with our brothers and sisters there, why as Indians we must raise our voice and why we must voice our dissent.

For me expression of dissent is key to democracy and I’ve felt that many people were keeping quiet on this.

At a talk in Chennai, a young 23-year-old woman stood up to ask what kind of freedom of expression and fundamental rights were we talking about. Till yesterday she was an Indian citizen, but tomorrow she may not be one, she said. She was a Hindu from the eastern part of the country. It got me thinking.

When I returned to Mumbai, I told a few friends about this incident. These are friends who have well-paying jobs and one of them was a Muslim. As soon as I mentioned this incident, the Muslim friend started crying profusely. This took me by surprise and when I asked him the reason, he said in his family they were all looking for their grandfather’s documents as he had joined the Indian National Army. They were unable to find them.

He asked how he would be able to prove that he was here before 1947 and that his grandparents were part of the freedom struggle.

Here was somebody who was looking for documents dating back to 60-70 years and is upset that he cannot find them. I realised suddenly that I too did not have these documents from even 20-30 years earlier. But I am not bothered. As a Hindu here, I am not worried.

When I went to Lucknow for a convention, the front page of a newspaper had the main story on a cleric asking all Muslims to have one of the 22 documents ready. He was trying to help Muslims there.

I was reading a graphic novel called Maus by Art Spiegelman. It is on the Holocaust and it records the announcement asking all Jewish males to come with their documents to a particular stadium to prove their citizenship. The announcement added that the documentation was to protect them as citizens. I then understood why there was fear among a certain set of population, fear among almost 20 crore people. This is when I began to understand the National Register of Citizens.

The political messaging around NRC is that if you follow any religion other than Islam, you do not have to worry, because there would be a Citizenship Amendment Bill.

Even if Hindus are not able to prove that they are citizens of India, they will be deemed as refugees and they will then be conferred citizenship. While the government doesn’t state it explicitly, the message is that Hindus do not have to worry.

Should illegal immigrants be thrown out? Who will say, no ? But illegal immigrants have been divided into two groups – refugees and infiltrators. All non-Muslims are refugees while Muslims are infiltrators.

Wherever I go and ask if infiltrators should be thrown out, they all say ‘Yes’. When I ask, ‘Should black money be eliminated?’ Here also the answer is always ‘Yes’.

These are the questions that political masters are asking, reducing complex issues to simple questions that strike a chord with the people.

I am trying to make people understand that these issues are complex and have shades of grey. I refer to Demonetisation, which was said to be designed to eliminate black money. People were gullible and believed the Government and though black money was hoarded in cash.

But this was a lazy and disastrous solution. Black Money has not been eliminated. But the problem is that people do not ask counter questions to the Government.

People should have asked the Government to explain what was Black Money. Was It the Rs 20,000 that someone’s mother had saved and kept in a jar in the kitchen, or was it the money that street vendors used daily or the money that rickshaw pullers or small shopkeepers handled?

Black money has two definitions – money that has been got through illegal means and the undocumented money as there is no tax paid on that money per se. But people thought that black money was something that is kept in Switzerland by the corrupt.

Like Demonetisation, in NRC the country will be burdened with another lazy, stupid and disastrous decision. Because the Government now identifies illegal immigrants on the basis of documents. That means an illegal immigrant is one who does not have valid documents.

People understand that there are many people who do not have documents. If they are told that they need documents from more than 70 years ago, everyone understands that most people do not have documents of such vintage.

We should also keep in mind how documents are made in the government. In my own case, in one document my name is spelt as Kannan, in another it is Kanan, in a third document it is Kannan Gopinayar and in a fourth document it is Kannan Gopinathan.

If a government official asks why the name is different in different documents, there cannot be a satisfactory answer. They can say then always say that the person was trying to forge documents and hence is a doubtful citizen.

Who do not have these documents? The answer is clear – the poor, dalits, adivasis, women and the landless. Women marry and move to a new place without any document.

Then there are the homeless; how will they get 50-year-old documents? People affected by natural calamities will also have no documents. When parts of Kerala were flooded, even banks could not save their documents, how can people?

Like everything else in this country, people with connections and resources will find a way to avoid it, but the poor will get trapped as they were by Demonetisation. The poor will also have to spend a lot of money to undertake this exercise. This country, this government has already burdened them enough and now they want to torture them. NRC has nothing to do with Muslims; it is an anti-poor, anti-Dalit, anti-women law.

In Assam, if it took six years for just a three-crore population with 50,000 employees putting in an effort and Rs 1600 crore expenditure to come up with a list, which everyone wants to effectively junk, then how much time and money must be spent on a population of 130 crores ? Add to this the mental agony and the depression the people would have to go through.

NRC is actually the process of shifting the burden of proving citizenship from the government to a citizen. The government wants to shift this responsibility because they do not want to do their job.

It is the government’s job to identify illegal immigrants, but the government is lazy. So, they want to ask the citizens to prove their citizenship. How can a government do this? Do they have the right to shift the burden of their duty on citizens?

That we exist in this country is proof enough that we are citizens. If the government was doubtful of our citizenship, how did they come to power? How did they take our votes to form the government?

Then their being in the government itself should be doubted. This completely lazy decision making without realising the disaster is what should be stopped.

This government will come and go but the effect of it will remain as they will not be able to finish it within their term. People will have to queue up in front of government offices for 20-30 years just to prove that they are citizens. This is why some of the bureaucrats are supporting it because they do not want to do their jobs. They should put in an effort to do the job of identifying illegal immigrants. What is stopping them from doing it as the existing law has provisions for it?

Is it the most important issue when unemployment is at its peak, when the economy is in doldrums and a large population remains uncertain about their future?

I am appalled at the thinking capacity of this government, at the dumbness and idiocy of this policy. I am convinced that this policy is being pursued to ensure that people are constantly kept in fear and insecurity.

A policy that is essentially anti-poor, anti-women and anti-Dalit is also being made anti-Muslim through the Citizenship Amendment Bill. The government is sending out a message that they care about the rest of the citizens as they have seen in Assam that out of the 19 lakh who were excluded from the NRC, at least 11 lakh were Hindus.

They understand the enormity of this issue and what they are doing. But their solution is to tell Hindus that they don’t have to worry. Their solution is that those who do not have documents will be considered as refugees provided, they are able to prove they have come from one of the three countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan).

Effectively to Hindus they are saying that they will be deemed to be refugees from one of these countries. If a person does not have documents of this country, then how will they have documents of another country from more than 50 years ago? This is intended to ensure that even Hindus must not raise questions.

If this country embarks on such a path, it will be difficult for us to return. This will also be an exercise in hatred. Then we will go down the road on which many countries which started as democracies but ended up as failures had embarked. This 20-year-old process will be the beginning of that.

This makes NRC anti-citizen, but they are marketing it as an anti-Muslim legislation to serve their political interests.

We must ask the government why they have failed at their job and why do they want to shift the burden to the common citizen of this country, why do they want to torture and harass the normal person?

Most importantly, who are they to ask me about my citizenship? Let them identify infiltrators; let them expel illegal immigrants. But to ask an entire population to prove their citizenship is an act of madness.

If there is an undeclared emergency, there will also be undeclared resistance. We have a moral duty to oppose such policies which are going to ruin our country for our next generation. We may be able to save money and a house for our next generation, but unless we save our country for them, none of these things will really matter.

This exercise of making people anxious because of alleged lack of documents and creating a communal divide on that account will not be allowed in this country.

We will save the country from such people.

(As told to Ashlin Mathew)