CAA, NRC And NPR - The Unsolved Mystery

Protest All Over The Country

We will talk about CAA, NRC and NPR. These news have been coming for a while now we will talk about the definitions and what are these terms related.

NPR  is National population Register and NRC is National Register of Citizens. We will talk about these two before going to CAA. National Population Register is a database of all the people living in an area. This is an important distinction between NPR and NRC. NPR setup people living in an area whereas NRC represent citizens of a country. So let us say there is a foreign national in Bangalore, he/she will be counted in NPR and will not be listed in NRC. This is a minute distinction between these two but that's a technical difference.

The NPR process is very much like a census process and it's database is very much like census database. There is like different meanings of these two and people thinks both are not interconnected. NRC was conceived of as a way of identifying illegal immigrants coming in to a place. The claim is if someone is not a citizen of India and living here in our country, we should be able to identify and deal with it. How to deal completely depends on the government. If there is a NRC and you are not on NRC list, you are not a citizen. NRC has been implemented in Assam and the claim is if it has been implemented in Assam it might be implemented to the rest of the country. Many peoples in Assam almost close to million haven't found their name on NRC. So these are some initial problems coming in implementation of the law. So what's necessary if you need to have an idea about NRC and NPR.

What Is CAA

Full form of CAA is Citizenship Amendment Act. What government is now saying is if you have been persecuted because you are a religious minority from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan then you will be granted a  form of citizenship in India. Religious minority could be Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians and parsis from three countries. So keep in mind that it is about religious minority persecution, so if you are a Muslim from these three countries you don't have a root to acquiring citizenship in most natural form in India by CAA.

Issues with CAA Or NRC

Indian constitution makes it clear that there will be no discrimination based on religion whereas this seeks to make a distinction based on religion. The government is saying we are creating a mechanism for people who were suppressed minorities. The country's majority Muslims are seeing this as a problem. Therefore the distinction is happening based on how they are define it and the government is not creating distinction based on religion. The people opposing this law are saying no citizenship naturally available to Muslims. That it is the script. This is NPR, NRC and CAA.

Protests Burning Country All Around

Main question is how are the is protest taking shape and what are the protesters claiming?

The NRC combined with CAA basically said the huse list of people were called citizens of this country. Now if you don't find your name on it and you happened to be a Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist or Parsi, you can even say that you who came in here and ask for citizenship or you have a route to citizenship.

Police Controlling Protesters

But if you are a Muslim in India and you don't find your name on NRC, then the duty of establishing the fact that either you for your ancestors were citizens of India by providing the document, the country is demanding is completely on you.

So naturally Muslims not listed in NRC needs to prove that he/she is a citizen of the country. It can be widely discriminated if both the laws are put together. This is a serious issue that's why so many peoples are protesting right now. This is a concern.

The government is saying we need to be providing this only for non Muslims because the country is right in focusing on saying that we are going to protect them from religious persecution. The opposition is saying this is not bad, good enough, but there are Muslims in Bangladesh and Pakistan who are being discriminated, why are we not helping them?

The government saying we need to draw a line somewhere and this is where we have drawn.

Dealing With The Complexity

One of the best articles I read from Prashant Kishor, a political strategist. He is a part of JDU in Bihar and speaks very clearly. He mentioned beautiful and said government is elected one and claiming to be listening the opinion of the majority and they are saying this act makes sense. This is a democratic process and there is nothing unusual about that. The opposition is creating a body of faults and saying these are the issues on which we could be going against what is written in constitution.The courts are listening to this. The people are protesting against this and they have been given avenues to protest. So far all of these are aspects of a well functioning democracy and there is nothing here which could be said wrong. The government has passed something, opposition has raised voice, supreme court has taken care of this, the students and people are protesting everywhere and protests are happening. Nobody is clamping down on them aggressively. We are able to hear both sides of opinion. These are the some points which he mentioned beautifully.

The burden of proving all this is disproportionate and is disproportionately heavy on poor. If you are reading this article and you are preparing for your interview, it will help you. Between us this is like a homely discussion and if I don't find my name on NRC and I am desperate to have it, I go and find some records and if I need to go through a set a process to clean up those records by paying money through the official system, I will pay the system specially and I will make sure I am listed on NRC. It might take two days or five days of seven days of my time but I will take that time out and spend that money to get my name on the list.

But that burden of extracting time from the system for extracting that 5000 to 10000 could be very high for some of those who are poor. Chances are it can bother them and come back to bite them. This can also make way for bureaucracy to bully people and that happenes very frequently in our country. This is going to create that.

You can be a citizen, you can be declared a non-citizen, you can be put under doubtful category. Some guy who is walking with a tie and marker has a discretion to determine your citizenship by ticking on arbitrary boxes. Someone somewhere can have an entire racket, 5000 and you were in. The system give power to some bureaucrats to put question on anybody being a citizen, and might extracts certain dollars from us. And that is something where an economic burden placed on people because of this in a country with lots and lots of poor people. we should not add one more layer of paying for them in terms of documentation.

That is my Idea and once again I will repeat this that whenever you discuss current affairs topics like this read this facts, data, go through acts, see both sides of arguments, then if you see any informed opinion emerging from all of that, hang on to that. Don't jump to an opinion without going through facts.