Countering opposition to new citizenship legislation

M Rajivlochan

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The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) of 2019 — which has become an Act after presidential assent — provides for a quicker process by which migrants to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan can get Indian citizenship. The current process of acquiring Indian citizenship, created in 1955, is long. It requires a minimum 11 years of stay in India in addition to many other formalities. No wonder an extraordinarily large number of people who migrate to India and settle down here remain illegal migrants.

Read also: Why Assam is seething with anger

At the same time, the state system in India since Independence has been so full of ineptitude and incompetence that from the point of view of the poor, even being a citizen did not yield any specific benefits which could not be had by them as and when they so desired. As a result, there was never any demand from the side of the migrants to want the citizenship of India. The privilege of casting a vote in elections, getting a ration card, an Indian passport or Aadhaar card, even a government job, were easily available to them either at a price or freely, if they were lucky enough.

Since Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, efforts have been made to reduce the ineptitude and incompetence of the state.

Interestingly, the Modi government used the CAB as an opportunity to underline the fact that non-Muslims were persecuted in the three Islamic countries of India’s neighbourhood. This has evoked yet another barrage of expletives from the endemic critics of Modi.

However, when you look closely, the high horse that the critics of CAB are riding turns out to be a donkey. For, neither does the CAB make India a Hindu country, nor is it undemocratic and certainly does not make India unfit for living. If anything, by providing a quicker route to citizenship for the migrants, the CAB underlines the fact that India is welcoming of those who are in trouble. That has been the reason why India remains one of the favourite destination for migrants.

As recently as for 2018, the World Migration Report says that of the top 20 Migration Corridors in Asian countries, the India-Bangladesh border remains the second most important in terms of migrant volumes. We may add that this has been the condition ever since the formation of Pakistan as a country for Muslims in 1947.

Reverse migration

In 1950, just three years after Pakistan was formed, in Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal, thousands of Muslims who had emigrated to Pakistan in 1947, returned to settle in India. The newspapers reported that over 80,000 Meos had come back to their homes in the districts of Bharatpur and Alwar; thousands of Muslims returned to PEPSU to pick up their lives in India once again; in the districts of Nadia and 24 Parganas, over 7,000 returned. In June 1956, the Union Ministry of Rehabilitation reported that over 1,00,000 Meos had been successfully resettled after they returned to India from Pakistan. However, not a single Hindu returned to either West or East Pakistan.

By 1955, the government was spending about Rs33 crore every year to rehabilitate these migrants. On a gold equivalent, this comes to about Rs15,000 crore in 2019. Little wonder that Partap Singh Kairon, when he was put in charge of rehabilitation in Punjab, pushed for a quick resettlement of all displaced persons.

In Bengal and Assam, the migration of people continued unabated throughout the 1950s because of attacks on Hindus in East Pakistan, as the governments of both India and Pakistan acknowledged. The state governments regularly complained about these migrants, who they said were unwanted. Pt Nehru did little beyond expressing concern at the persecution of ‘minority’ groups in Pakistan which forced them to migrate to India.

The Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950, in which both countries promised to protect their minorities, was Pakistan’s way of saying that minorities (read, Muslims) in India were unsafe. The pact was the equivalent of the joint statement in 2009 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s PM Yusuf Raza Gilani at Sharm el-Sheikh, that allowed the Pakistan PM to claim that India had a hand in promoting terrorism in Balochistan. But then, international diplomacy that protects and promotes Indian interests has never been a strong point with India.

Even after Pakistan had reneged on its commitments in the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, the Government of India did little to either challenge the perception of minorities being under threat or to stem the tide into India of thousands of migrants each month. They did keep enumerating the migrants.

At least on one occasion India was told by Pakistan that Indians were free to fence off the border to stop such migration. Very soon census figures would show that while the population of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh reduced drastically over the years, it increased faster than the average in India.

After the birth of Bangladesh

In the 1970s, the eruption of rebellion in East Pakistan and the accompanying genocide forced millions of Bengali refugees, mostly Muslims, into India. They were given shelter in special camps set up across India. As Praful Patel of the NCP recalled in his intervention in the Rajya Sabha on the CAB, one such camp was created in his home district, Gondia, in Maharashtra. Only some of the refugees went back to Bangladesh after Pakistan was driven off.

The flow of migrants from Bangladesh continued despite Indira Gandhi going on record promising to push back all migrants. At the same time, the Government of India stopped keeping count of the migrants coming from Bangladesh. It was only in the mid-1970s that Assam erupted in flames in protest against outsiders who had settled there, threatening to reduce the indigenous people of Assam into a minority. Since then, there has been a dire need to identify illegal migrants and formalise their status. The CAB is a step towards this.

— The writer is Professor of History, Panjab University