Netflix documentary a reminder on Nazis and NRC, mandatory viewing for history buffs 

Watching the Netflix documentary Greatest Events of WW2 brought back all those terrible images and stories of the depths to which humanity can sink.

It’s a reminder we constantly need, with or without George Santayana’s aphorism which has now become a cliché more honoured in the breach. In one of those odd coincidences that life throws at you, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced his ghastly plan to take the National Register of Citizens across India just as I finished watching.

The parallels with the rise of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler, the lies and propaganda spun by Joseph Goebbels and the cruelty of the Waffen SS under Heinrich Himmler may be oft stated, but they are too important to ignore. If it is exaggeration to say that Hitler’s horrific Final Solution is now close, it is also true that only eternal vigilance will keep it away.

In the manner in which the NRC has been done in Assam, with 19 lakh people now without citizenship and talk of “detention camps” for them is casual in its callous cruelty. However, by unearthing a plan in cold storage and making it an election promise, the Bharatiya Janata Party had only one agenda in store: Bharat as a great Hindu kingdom.

Underpinning that is the rampant hatred of Muslims which is the cornerstone of the RSS’s very existence. Amit Shah has gone around India calling Bangladeshis “termites”. The othering and dehumanising that the Nazis did to the Jews is a clear “inspiration”.

The Nazis made Jews their main target, but they also imprisoned and murdered

Gypsies,

Homosexuals,

Intellectuals,

Opponents,

Russians,

Communists – anyone who either opposed their ideology or challenged their idea of racial purity. And in a far more calculated manner, the dehumanisation of Jews was necessary to keep the sheep-like population distracted by war losses and defeats.

You may think you know all this. In that case, look around you. From 2014 to now, we have seen the deliberate dehumanisation of

Muslims,

Dalits,

Christians,

Intellectuals,

Journalists,

Students,

Dissenters.

The move to take NRC across India is one more building block of this hateful destructive ideology.

Suppose you still believe in this lying, incompetent, despotic government. Then check through your own various forms of government identification:

Ration cards,

PAN cards,

Voter ID cards,

Driving Licences,

Passports

and Aadhaar cards:

Evidently these are not enough to prove citizenship. Therefore, you need

Birth certificates,

Parents’ birth certificates,

Grandparents’ birth certificates.

Property papers past and present.

We have a Census every decade.

That is also not enough. Now we need one more process, and a process that will be damaging and painful and for some, well-nigh impossible.

Aadhaar itself, as we know, was intrusive and unnecessary. It took sustained civil society efforts and court intervention to stop it from completely overtaking our individual sovereignty.

Across most of India, people do not have access to paperwork or to digital data. As it is, there is immense agricultural distress as farmers do not have the identity papers needed to collect the insurance that is their due.

There is a reason why so many private Aadhaar operators just added January 1 as a default date of birth: so many people have no such proof of birth. To India’s poor, this plan is doubly diabolical.

In Assam, families have been torn apart over the demands of the NRC. Parents and children separated. There appears to be no logic in the distinctions. Unless you accept that logic was not used in the process because the process is not what you think it is. That it is a clear attempt to divide India, to create fear and therefore submission and to justify the desire for second-class citizens.

What else can be the justification for a National Register for Citizens?

As citizens however we have a choice. We have a choice not to succumb to a totalitarian government. We have a choice not to be sheep. We have the choice to exercise our voices and our democratic rights. We have the choice not to close our eyes to atrocities happening in front of our eyes.

If we don’t speak up now, we will have no control over how history judges us and how our future looks back with contempt.