Who Is (Not) A Citizen?

The newly minted Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and the government double-speak on an impending National Register of Citizens have lent a bleeding edge to the question. What is the threat and why have citizens across the country erupted in protest?

- Kaushik Deka

On november 27 last year, Bangladesh cricketer Saif Hasan was at the Kolkata airport, waiting to fly back home after a Test series in India, when he realised to his horror that his visa had expired two days back. He had to pay a fine of Rs 21,600 to get exit clearance. Now here’s the rub. If Hasan had not been a Muslim, he could have got away with a fine of just Rs 100. There is no coherent official explanation for this, but the Union government in January 2019 announced a huge cut in fines for minority community travellers—Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Jain and Parsi from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan—who had overstayed.

This curious tweak in regulations wasn’t just an indirect encouragement to minorities from these three Muslim-majority countries to migrate to India, but also a precursor to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, 2019. The contentious act has raised questions about violations of the Constitution and India’s secular ethos while also creating a deep schism on religious and ethnic lines. More importantly, the national outrage against the act—primarily expressed in protests led by students and the common people—has emerged as the most challenging crisis Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government has faced since it first came to power in 2014.