‘Patriotic’ BJP-ruled states too have failed in processing all documents sought by NRC, leaving many bona fide Indian citizens in the lurch.
That “India is for Indians first” should not be in dispute. Indeed, control over a nation’s borders is central to the conception of the Westphalian nation-state. But India has not done terribly well on this count, with several porous borders, most notably with Bangladesh in the east. As a consequence, for decades, there’s been a steady influx of illegal Bangladeshi migrants entering India looking for a better life. The government estimates around two crore illegal Bangladeshis currently live and work in India. Many manage to get local documents, which they’re not entitled to, perhaps with the connivance of political parties for whom they are a useful votebank.
One of the Narendra Modi government’s attempts to crack down on such an overt challenge to India’s control over its borders is updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), jointly produced by the central and the Assam governments. The NRC has not been updated since 1951, and in 2013, before Modi came to power, the Supreme Court mandated an update. This gave the Modi government an opportunity to promote its more muscular agenda at the border. The trouble is, the final draft has left 40 lakh individuals out of the list, some of whom are presumably legitimate Indian citizens.
In fact, as it’s been reported widely in the media, quite a few bona fide Indians who have no connection to Bangladesh have been left out of the list. These individuals face, in theory, deportation or other dire consequences and disenfranchisement at a minimum. They could be the collateral damage of the government’s stated goal to secure the borders and keep out illegal migrants.
Also read: In Assam, NRC is now National Register of Confusion
Yet if this were really the goal, it’s odd that no agreement has been reached with Bangladesh on the would-be deportees. Without such an agreement, where exactly will these individuals go? Bangladesh denies any of these people are theirs, making it unlikely that a solution would be in the offing. Indeed, India’s record on deporting illegal Bangladeshis back to Bangladesh is not one of much success. In 2017, a grand total of 51 individuals were deported, according to the government.
Advocates of the NRC assert somewhat improbably that all of the necessary legal safeguards are in place so that no one legitimate will be left out of the final list. But this is problematic for several reasons. First, the documentary requirements to prove citizenship under the rules governing the NRC are quite stringent, and it’s entirely plausible that many legitimate individuals simply cannot cross this hurdle. How many of us have documents going to back to our grandparents’ generation? Yet documents predating the Bangladesh war of 1971 are mandatory under the NRC. Privileged folk with resources and connections may be able to meet the NRC’s requirements; you can be sure that many poor and disadvantaged people simply cannot cope with such demands.
But there’s a second and more fundamental problem with the assertion. Advocates pre-suppose that the Indian state functions well. Anyone who’s actually dealt with the Indian state at any level knows otherwise. The truth is that the state has very limited capacity and there is no reason to feel reassured that this low level of capacity is sufficient to lead to a fair and complete NRC.
There is an additional serious complication, which is that putting together the NRC requires the cooperation not just of the central and the Assam governments but the governments of all the other states and Union Territories (UT) who’ve been queried to certify documents concerning individuals who may have migrated from these states.
This requires that not only all the other states have sufficient capacity but also that they have the political will to devote capacity to what is essentially someone else’s problem. If there is limited cooperation by other states, the NRC by definition is doomed to be flawed and incomplete because it will miss out a large chunk of migrants along with any others who get left out through other sources of error.
My data analysis shows that this is indeed the dire situation we’re in.
Data submitted to the Supreme Court tells us the number of documents sought by NRC from each state and UT and how many were actually processed and returned over a three year-period up until March 2018. The chart presents data on all states plus Delhi but excludes other UTs where presumably the cooperation of the central government can be assumed and the number of cases involved is tiny.
The numbers do not paint a pretty picture. The national average on compliance percentage as of 23 March 2018 is 30.6 per cent. This however masks considerable variation ranging from Goa at 95.3 per cent to Chhattisgarh, which is at zero.
One might assume that states ruled by the BJP or its allies would have a higher compliance rate than non-BJP ruled states and this in fact is true. The average for states ruled by BJP or its allies is 37.4 per cent or above the national average. The average for non-BJP ruled states is a paltry 9.21 per cent.
Strikingly, West Bengal is at only 6.5 per cent, in other words even below the average for states not ruled by the BJP or allies. This is low by any standard and it would be reasonable to assume that West Bengal’s low compliance reflects as much the state government’s lack of interest or even hostility to the NRC as it does poor state capacity.
Also read: NRC shows Supreme Court has made a messy issue messier
The bottom line is that less than a third of files sent from Assam to other states have been processed: potentially leaving countless people unregistered through no fault of their own. This is not a trivial problem, given how important inter-state migration is in India.
As documented in the Economic Survey 2016-17, inter-state migration is higher than is commonly believed, estimated to be about 90 lakh a year between 2011 and 2016. Even a relatively poor state like Assam receives migrants from other states. In fact, as the Economic Survey documents, Assam is an important recipient of migrants from West Bengal. There are therefore without doubt many Bengali migrants in Assam who’ve been left out of the NRC.
There is an overarching paradox here. The notion of “India is for Indians first” is the result of decades of poor state capacity, leading to porous borders and countless illegal migrants. Yet, the proposed solution, ironically, presupposes strong state capacity: that governments at the Centre and all the states are able to process lakhs of documents in a timely fashion. And as we have seen, as expected, compliance has been poor, even from “patriotic” BJP-ruled states. There is either a huge cognitive dissonance or unalloyed hypocrisy in such an assumption.
Rupa Subramanya is an independent researcher and economist. Twitter: @rupasubramanya