Jaggi Vasudev’s CAA defence is illogical, flawed

Persecution of Hindus in Pakistan. Counting dogs in Coimbatore. Who the hell are you? Through three succinct phrases, Jaggi Vasudev explained why the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) -National Register of Citizens (NRC) controversy which has taken the nation by storm is a non-issue. His remarks were startling in their simplicity, and delivered with the sophistication of an urbane monk. They were also largely devoid of logic and flawed in their reading of the law.

Vasudev recounts a recent conversation with a Pakistani Hindu man. The man informed him that his Hindu wife was taken away and forcibly made to marry “a man from another religion”. This man, according to Vasudev, was persecuted on account of his religion, as Hindu marriages are not recognised by law in Pakistan. It is for such persons that the CAA is a demonstration of compassion allowing them to get citizenship in India, he suggested.

Except that the CAA will not give any protection to this unfortunate Pakistani Hindu. Since he met Vasudev recently, at a time when he was still a Pakistani national, he does not satisfy a key precondition to be a beneficiary of the CAA — that he should have entered India before December 31, 2014. This cut-off date definitively demonstrates that the CAA is not a legislation that is sincerely aimed at the protection of religiously persecuted minorities. If there were a pogrom against Hindus in Pakistan today, the CAA would do nothing to protect them. It is clear that the Act wants to protect a certain kind of religious minority from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — those who have entered India before December 31, 2014. To understand why this is so, one needs to understand the NRC.

Vasudev compared the NRC with the counting of dogs in Coimbatore in the aftermath of feral strays killing children in the city. The analogy, provocations aside, achieves the opposite result from what Vasudev intends. Dogs needed to be counted so that the Coimbatore administration knew how many dogs lived in the city, with a view to prevent future killings. It is immaterial to the exercise whether the dogs were born in Coimbatore or migrated to the city from elsewhere. An exercise of this nature for human beings is the census. The census, which counts the population of every country, is needed for governments to approximately identify the number of persons who reside in the country. This is the only information the government needs in order to go about its task of ensuring law and order and making policies.

Citizenship, on the contrary, is an artificial construct. It is neither embedded in one’s DNA nor is it a simple consequence of residence. In Vasudev’s example, if there were a rule that only a dog which has both its parents born in Coimbatore will be counted as a dog legitimately living in Coimbatore, that would be akin to a citizenship registration exercise. Make an artificial rule, assess who qualifies, discount (cull?) the rest. To this already onerous exercise, imagine a secondary rule that all Labradors, German Shepherds, Mongrels, Pugs, Pomeranians and Cocker Spaniels would still be counted even though both their parents were not born in Coimbatore, if they could demonstrate that they came to Coimbatore escaping persecution in Ooty. That is exactly what the CAA is — all dogs are equal, some more equal than others.

And if one can’t demonstrate, whether with the benefit of CAA or otherwise, that one ought to be counted as a citizen, Vasudev says to such a person: “Who the hell are you?” In his example, such a person is one who lives in India but cannot produce a birth certificate, school leaving certificate, ration card, Aadhaar, voter ID card and not even three witnesses who can attest to his Indianness.

If producing any one of these documents qualifies one to be on the NRC, it is likely that many foreigners who reside in India will easily make the cut. This will make the whole exercise superfluous.

On the other hand, if the process is too onerous requiring much more documentation and stricter scrutiny, many Indian citizens, born in India and who have lived their entire lives here, will have their Indianness subject to the scrutiny of government officials. The Assam NRC exercise is demonstrable proof of the massive exclusion of citizens that ensues when this happens.

The CAA-NRC will either end up superfluous or exclusionary, no matter how the government chooses to finesse it. There is no third way.

Irrespective of how the government tries to work it, at its core, the CAA-NRC is foolishly ambitious, unnecessary, deceptive, unconscionable and a scab on the soul of India.

Arghya Sengupta is research director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy

The views expressed are personal