by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Abdul Gani and Ahmad Adil,
Guwahati/Chandigarh: A retired junior commissioned officer, who served in the Indian army, is among four million people whose names were excluded in the draft list of citizens issued by the Indian government.
The government published a draft known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) on Monday.
“This is very unfortunate. I just can’t accept this behavior. I’m deeply hurt,” 50-year-old Azmal Haque, who retired from the Indian Army in 2016, told Anadolu Agency.
The NRC list is unique to Assam. It was first tabulated in 1951, four years after independence from British rule, to distinguish Indian citizens from illegal migrants from bordering Bangladesh, which was then part of Pakistan.
“I never expected to see this day, even after serving the nation for 30 years, I will not be called as an Indian citizen,” Haque said.
“There are around seven such persons who have served the Indian Army or Indian Air Force but their names were not mentioned in the list. We are going to write to the president of India for questioning our citizenship,” says Haque, who is permanent resident of Chaygaon village in Kamrup district of northeastern Assam State.
The list includes only those people or their descendants who entered India till midnight of March 24, 1971, when Bangladesh became an independent state.
However, the Bangladeshi government labeled it an “internal issue” of India and stated that Dhaka has nothing to do with the matter.
“Whatever is happening in Assam is an internal issue,” Bangladesh’s Minister of Information Hasanul Haq Inu told Indian broadcaster WION on Tuesday.
“Assam is a case of purely ethnic conflict,” he said and noted that the Delhi government “has not raised this issue with us.”
“Bangladesh government is not interested in starting any communication since there is no robust way to stop illegal immigration,” Inu said.
The first draft of the list published on Monday left out four million people. The move has triggered fears that a huge population would be rendered stateless.
The Indian government stated the new law considers those who arrived before the war as legitimate citizens.
“Our forefathers have lived here. We have submitted the documents of pre-independence era (1947). So, there is no doubt about that. I think it’s some human error that has kept me out of the list. But I’m pretty sure to get included in the list,” 38-year-old Pitambar Newar from Duliajan, a town in the eastern part of Assam, told Anadolu Agency.
Controversy
The move by the Indian government has triggered a massive political controversy in the country, with many political leaders fearing the move could result into a “civil war”.
The ruling Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) President Amit Shah on Tuesday said that those people whose names are not in the NRC are “intruders” as they have failed to prove their Indian citizenship.
Assam’s former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi from Indian National Congress party said there are flaws in the final draft. “We were expecting to have an error-free NRC. But I think there are flaws in the list that was announced on July 30,” he said.
However, Prateek Hajela, the NRC coordinator, said those people whose names were not listed should not be worried.
“This is not the final list. This is just a draft. The individuals will be given ample opportunities. They can fill up a form and claim their names, objections and even clarifications if needed,” Hajela tells Anadolu Agency.
The process of filing objections would begin Aug. 30 and continue until Sept. 30, according to the officials.
‘Unacceptable’ move
Human Rights activists have condemned the government’s move, calling it “unacceptable.”
“The government should set up an ombudsman along with civil society and neutral entities from within our country, to review every name,” Brinda Adige, a rights activist told Anadolu Agency.
The Indian Supreme Court, which is monitoring the process, said no action shall be taken on the basis of NRC draft.
“In this regard, the Court would like to observe that what has been published is only the Complete Draft NRC, which naturally being a draft cannot be the basis of any action by any authority,” said the Supreme Court order which was passed on Tuesday.
Debasish Bhattacharjee, a professor at the department of political science in Assam University, said the government needs to deal with the situation “very carefully.”
“It is difficult to comment about what is going to happen because there is no plan as to what will be the fate of those which will be left out in the final list,” Bhattacharjee said.
He said there was a less possibility that adjacent Bangladesh will accept those left out in the final list of NRC.
“I think they can’t be sent back anywhere, but they (left out) might be deprived from their voting rights or some civil rights,” he said. “It would create some ill will among those people and they might not turn loyal to Indian sovereignty,” Bhattacharjee added.
*Sorwar Alam in Ankara contributed to this story
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
Call it coincidence or mysterious design, there are moments in world affairs when disparate societies have the same experience.
I had barely registered that the sword of Damocles hung on the heads of over four million people, mostly Muslims, in Assam by a very Orwellian sounding National Register of Citizens, when a friend from New York drew my attention to similar happenings in Israel.
In Assam, the terrified Muslims have apparently failed to provide documentary proof of citizenship. The BJP governments at the Centre and in the state have been at pains to reassure Muslims staring at the abyss that they will have a chance to appeal what is for the time being only a provisional finding of the NRC. In any case whatever is happening is at the Supreme Court’s prodding.
Meanwhile, far removed from Assam, on July 19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s kindred spirit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed a boulder into the pond: He called it “a pivotal moment in the history of Zionism and the Jewish state”. The Knesset (Parliament) had passed a law which says: “The right of national self-determination is unique to the Jewish people.” Israel’s non-Jewish population have been left out. Assam’s Muslims, you are not alone.
I wish someone in the opposition galaxy would lambast the NRC half as effectively as Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO did the Israeli “perfidy”. The Jewish Nation State law, she said, is “apartheid, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and sectarianism at the expense of the Palestinian people”.
The way Donald Trump is distributing largesse to both Netanyahu and Modi (shifting the embassy to Jerusalem and promising NATO status to India), he qualifies as their “big daddy” for more reasons than one. He set very high standards on how to treat the “others” when they try to violate national borders. He separated children from their parents. Children were sent to foster homes and parents to jail.
Netanyahu’s dilemma is as old as Israel: Is it a democracy or a Jewish state? The new law would tend to tilt the balance one way. Of all the American Presidents, Jimmy Carter was the only one to place his finger on the pulse: “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”
In the past, New Delhi always had two distinct approaches to Israel. There was a tweed-wearing, liberal, socialist disdain for Zionism opposed to a much more powerful “Hindu” empathy for the Jewish state which, like India, was surrounded by hostile Muslim neighbours.
Trump, the great guru of anti-foreigner xenophobia virtually tousled Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte’s hair, like a school master showering affection on a promising pupil. At a White House Joint Press Conference, Trump said: “I like your policies against illegal and legal immigrants.”
Matteo Salvini, of the xenophobic League Party, a self-confessed admirer of Mussolini, Deputy Prime Minister but in effect the driving force behind the coalition in Rome, must be swooning in ecstasy. He must feel reassured that he has kindred spirits in very high places.
His ties to Le Pen once raised the hackles of Jewish leaders like Riccardo Pacifici for anti-Semitic potential of the two. After all, Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen was a holocaust denier. Salvini clarifies that he hates Muslims, not Jews. That is salutary.
I doubt if friends in Israel would be overtly impressed by a Mussolini admirer denying his anti-Semitic instincts. Indeed, there is growing anxiety that wherever across the globe the raging anti-establishment wave has taken a turn to the far right, anti-Semitism has followed.
The People’s Party in Austria, a very fascist outfit, under 31-year-old Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has, as expected, revealed itself as virulently anti-Semitic. There are moves afoot to have Jews buying kosher meat to be placed on a separate registry. The most shrill voice supporting the move had been of Gottfried Waldhausl, former animal welfare minister. “Soon you will ask us to wear the Star of David on our chests” said a spokesman for the Jews.
In Austria has surfaced the perfect example of enemies joining hands in the face of common danger: Jewish and Muslim organisations have made common cause because “halal” meat too has come under fire.
Spokesman of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office has denounced attacks on “halal” meat for Muslims. “These are attacks on Jewish and Muslim ways of life.”
Global media, like the ostrich, has buried its head in the sand in the hope that a gust of anti-Semitism will pass even from a country like Poland where Auschwitz was supposed to be a constant reminder — “never again”. But what is happening is quite the contrary and scary. A law has been passed prohibiting Jews from reclaiming properties they lost during the holocaust.
Trump has rushed in with an act called “Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today”. In brief it is called the Just Act. It requires the State Department to monitor the activities of a dozen or so countries where anti-Semitism stands in the way of Jewish access to property lost during World War II. US President as a realtor is a brand new concept.
The potential of explosive nationalism (say, in Poland) being stoked by this kind of foreign intervention has apparently been lost on the authors. The image of Trump as a backyard bully will only grow, as will anti Semitism.
There is a profound lesson for a society like Israel in all of this. There is a potential for fascism, anti-Semitism, when anti-status quo movements take a sharp right turn. No such fear lurks when the Podemos rises in Spain, Syriza in Greece or when a 28-year-old Leftist bartender in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, beats a 10-term Democratic Law maker, or when Lopez Obrador knocks the stuffing out of the Right in Mexico. There are examples galore. Neither Jews nor Gentiles are invoked when movements talk of distributive justice and inequality.
(A senior commentator on diplomatic and political affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com . The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
