By Musheera Ashraf, TwoCircles.net
Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) :“It will be better if they give us poison,” says 35-years-old Ayesha from Nawabganj, the sole breadwinner in her family. Living in a roughly painted room with minimal utensils, furniture and a sewing machine, Ayesha had lost her parents at quite a young age and being the eldest among four sisters and a younger brother, she is adamant not to marry and instead look after her family.
“Our parents were uneducated, none of us have any birth certificates. They left us behind and now this political propaganda is causing us mental distress.” Controlling her tears Ayesha explains that she fears she would be rejected from obtaining the birth certificates of her siblings if they try to apply for them now because someone told her that it should have been made at the time of birth only. As suggested by one of her distant relatives, she is now seeing a lawyer to get her house papers ready.
“They were sent to camps when they failed to produce their citizenship through their papers” Ayesha recounts seeing a video on social media where she saw detention camps in Assam. She is horrified and helplessas she explains she earns her living by sewing clothes and has no time to keep hopping around lawyers and Nagar Nigam to get the official documents made.
Assam became the first state in the country to start updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2013. On 31 August 2019, the government released the final version of NRC with over 19 lakhs of the state population left out from the list.
Under the NRC, the primary criteria to prove citizenship is that the names of applicant’s family members should either appear in the first list prepared in 1951 or in the electoral rolls dating up to March 24, 1971. To produce documentary proof for supporting the relation with their ancestors under the register, applicants must have documents such as LIC policy, land and tenancy records, passport, permanent residential certificate, government employment certificate, educational certificate and other court records. Here is a list of acceptable documents under NRC in Assam.
What happens with the excluded individuals
The Association of Protection of Human rights (APDR) has collated 20 names from media reports they claim died of panic over the NRC or committed suicide. From the report, it is evident that most of them were either poor villagers or daily wage workers; who after knocking various government offices in search of legacy documents, gave up. These cases of deaths occurred in Assam after the final NRC list was made public.
The announcement by Union Home Minister Amit Shah about the Pan-India implementation of NRC after Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) has caused chaos in the country after the Home Minister’s controversial statement that, “the exercise will weed out all illegal infiltrators from India.”
After the implementation of CAA, people all over India have emerged out of their houses protesting against the Act and calling it a‘divide and rule policy’ by the government. People are now worried about NRC which is the next in their to-do list.
“Since decades when our ancestors were voting for them, why didn’t they doubt our citizenship then?” says Ayesha. She strongly feels that this is just a matter of creating chaos in the country to distract people from questioning the government about failures in development.
In a country with literacy rate of house less people 56.07% lower than national average of 74.04%, it is difficult to document ancestral records.“I was told to make an affidavit which will cost Rs 250 plus 10 Rs for every year since my daughter was born, I paid 300 Rs along with my husband’s aadhar card,” says 30-years-old Gulnaaz.
Standing among the group of ladies in a queue, she is waiting to get a photocopy of her husband’s aadhar card. Gulnaaz lives in Sarakdi Sheikh village of Saharanpur and has travelled some 10 km amid heavy rainfall just to apply for her daughter’s birth certificate, who is 5 years old now. Her husband is a daily wage worker who earns 500 Rs per day. He couldn’t afford their child’s delivery in the hospital, so her daughter was delivered at home, leaving them with no official proof from the hospital of her birth.After hearing the news of NRC implementation being planned all over India, she has come to Nagar Nigam to get her daughter’s birth proof ready.
“In 2015, our locality was waterlogged, we lost everything,” recalls Gulnaaz explaining that the property papers of their small room had also got lost in the disaster. She says they had purchased the room by selling off her jewellery and working day and night as daily wage labourers. She thinks even if she manages to get the papers remade, the government will find other ways to disown them.
“It is not about papers, it is about the religion card that they are playing,” says Gulnaaz with a heavy voice.The common perception that people are facing in sharp connection with implementation of NRC in Assam is of great fear that is ultimately leaving immense scope for arbitrariness and misuse. This fear is not restricted to people who lack evidence, but is also ripe among the ones who have their birth certificates and other documentary evidences with them. Gulnaaz is not the only one who feels this is an exercise targeting and filtering out Muslims in the state.
“Roti ka masla hal nhi hua tha, ab kagzaat kahan se banwaenge” (The matter of food was still unsolved and now how will we prepare documents) says Shabana Begum, a 50-year lady who lives in a rented house in Shamaadar. She has never attended school nor does she have a birth certificate. Like Gulnaaz, she laments that the present government is the government of rich people and even though no one has the right to ask the citizens who they are, they will be silenced if they try voicing out their views. Shabanahas a son whose birth certificate is made but her husband, like her, has none.
“The situation in the country is not good,” she feels. She recounts how thinking about the government demanding ancestral proofs often leads to sleepless nights.
“If they will treat us like second class citizens we would prefer to die”, says Shabana.
(This article is part of SEED Fellowship, which is TCN’s flagship journalism training and mentorship program for communities traditionally absent in mainstream media.)