While the Constitution of India ensures the fundamental rights and dignity of every individual, in Assam thousands of people are fighting the legal battle for citizenship. To fight these legal cases and to communicate the Constitutional rights, Guwahati based human rights lawyer Aman Wadud has been leading the initiative called Samvidhan Kendra or Constitution Centres in various parts of Assam. A TCN Ground Report features the lawyer and his work.
Mahibul Hoque | TwoCircles.net
GUWAHATI – “However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The Constitution can provide only the organs of the State such as the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. The factors on which the working of those organs of the State depends are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics.” This is how Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar had warned about the working of the Constitution during his Constituent Assembly speech. The fear expressed by Ambedkar has long turned out to be true for lakhs of Bengali origin people of Assam.
The categories like D-voter or doubtful voter and ‘declared foreigners of many genuine citizens existing in Assam— have particularly reinforced Ambedkar’s fearful assumption and also exposed the lot that has worked the Constitution in the state. This has led to the disenfranchisement of 3.15 lakh people from electoral rolls and more than 1.35 lakh people were declared foreigners by the foreign tribunals.
Foreigners tribunals or FTs are quasi-judicial bodies that have the power to give their opinion on the cases of doubtful citizens and issue an order declaring the citizenship status of the accused person in Assam. There are 100 FTs in Assam to hear the doubtful citizens cases and its members comprise mostly lawyers with ten years of experience from district courts.
At the receiving end of the wrath of ethno-nationalistic anger have been mostly the marginal communities from the state— Muslims and Hindus of Assam with Bengali origins. The anger towards these communities led to the rise of the dubious categories in the scenic, diverse, resource-rich and fertile north-eastern Indian state.
As a result, hundreds of the poor people, generally illiterate, from the migrant communities who have migrated to the state more than a century ago from parts of undivided India find themselves entangled in a legal battle that essentially questions their existence as equal citizens with unique identities.
Legal recourse to injustice
While the Constitution of India ensures the fundamental rights and dignity of every individual, thousands of people in Assam are fighting the legal battle for citizenship. To fight these legal cases and to communicate the Constitutional rights, Guwahati based human rights lawyer Aman Wadud has been leading the initiative called Samvidhan Kendra or Constitution Centres in various parts of Assam.
“This is not just a socio-political problem, but also a legal problem. Many of us may be pejoratively called Bangladeshi, but we are not the real victims. The real victims are those people whose citizenship has been questioned, who are running around to prove their citizenship by selling their cattle, property and lifetime savings. People whose families have been destroyed are the real victims, Aman told TwoCircles.net as he pointed out that though the Constitution provides legal agency to everyone irrespective of their social, political, cultural and educational status, there has been a gap in the form of realising the values of India’s foundational document.
“Constitution has been reduced to a very complex document, which is generally read by the lawyers or judges. But it is meant for people and it is meant for everyone. So how do we take this to the people and bridge the gap? That is how began the initiative of Samvidhan Kendras,” Aman added.
With six chapters in various districts of Assam at present, these Constitution centres maintain a vision of creating a pool of paralegal activists or volunteers who provide basic help to the person accused of being doubtful citizens or fighting their cases in the FTs.
The volunteers at Samvidhan Kendras are well connected with local activists from villages and know the legal recourses required to fight the ‘doubtful citizen’ cases. The paralegal activists connect the alleged person, and “mostly genuine Indian citizens, with lawyers from their respective districts.”
The paralegals also help during the entire proceeding of the trial before FT.
Corroborating Aman’s sentiments, Ruhul Amin Ahmed, a social activist, who is associated with Kalgachia Samvidhan Kendra in Barpeta district, said, “People are not aware of the Constitutional rights and thus it’s easy to dehumanize them.”
As an activist, Ahmed would discuss the issue of citizenship in Assam, but working at the Constitution Centre he has witnessed the underlying crisis. “We (Bengali Muslims) have to be very careful with our documents and keep them handy even if NRC is finally published. At least for the next 20 years, we need to maintain our records. You never know what form the challenge may take despite the NRC,” he said.
The NRC or National Register of Citizens was updated in Assam under the supervision of the Supreme Court and the final version was published on August 31, 2019. As many as 1.9 million from 3,30,27,661 applicants were left out of the NRC. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government wants the re-verification of 20 per cent of people who have been included in the NRC.
For 55-year-old Harej Uddin from Govindpur village in Assam’s Barpeta district, it would have been almost impossible to find a legal recourse to fight the doubtful citizen case notified against him by the border branch of Assam police from the district. Harej was declared a foreigner by the FT-6 of his district after a struggle of more than six years. “I don’t even know why I was declared as a foreigner. The lawyer told me that I will have to take the case to the (Guwahati) High Court, then I came to know about the Samvidhan Centre (at Kalgachia). People at the centres helped me with the documents and directed me to meet the lawyer in Guwahati. As a brick kiln labourer, it would have been very difficult for me if I had to pay money. But the lawyer there did not take any money,” he said.
Samvidhan Kendra volunteers also try to arrange the money in case they have to pay the lawyer who charges a nominal fee from the people who go through the centres.
Apart from the doubtful citizens, these centres also look forward to sensitising about constitution to the general public as well.
Mirza Lutfar Rahman, a community journalist and social activist, who set up the Samvidhan Kendra at Sontoli village said, “I want to take the Constitution to the younger generation from our community. I can do it via this Constitution centre.”
As Aman hopes to create a community of paralegal volunteers to solve the legal problem of people by the people, Lutfar’s views reflect the community participation.
A Fulbright fellow, Aman said, “It is necessary to inculcate the habit of reading among people, especially among younger ones. For that, we hope to set up libraries within the Samvidhan Kendras where people read the Constitution and know their rights.”
While he believes that the society at large failed to uphold the rights of fellow citizens, Samvidhan Kandras will engage people to fight for the rights of the most vulnerable individuals in the fight against injustice.