Crawling to Confinement

It seems that it is only the dates on the calendar that are moving towards the future.

With the recent headlines of Kashmir struggling in the clutches of communication shut down and the newly branded illegal immigrants of Assam constructing their own detention centers, I am certain we are only going backwards.

We carry our secularism with pride in the Indian Constitution and boast of inclusivity for diversity. However, what is the use of these fancy words on paper if we refuse to live by them every single day?

The National Register of Citizens is The Supreme Court-monitored exercise is aimed at determining who was born in the state of Assam and who might be a migrant from Muslim-majority Bangladesh or other neighboring regions. It counts as Indian citizens those who can prove they were residents of Assam up to midnight on March 24, 1971 -- a day before Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan, leading to a war that killed hundreds of thousands.

It is not difficult to understand that after a process of filtering citizens, there needs to be a systematized mechanism to take care of the ones who will be filtered out. It is only human to have a procedural approach to the same. However, we have clearly lost all of humanity. 

Rural citizens are compelled to prove their identity using documents that are decades old. Hopeless tales of citizens who do not have access to any resources are now doing rounds online. Battling through each day to find pieces of papers that will help them not to be rendered homeless in a few months, these people are unaware of the legal discourse they can adopt against such divisive decrees. 

Amongst the stories of many others, it was the story of Morisful Begum published by Bloomberg that struck me the hardest. She couldn’t eat or sleep after she discovered that she had been declared a foreigner while her husband and three children had been recognized as Indian citizens. She’s eight months pregnant, and can’t afford the cost of appealing the decision on top of expenses for food and school.

It is beyond disheartening to see that unaware, innocent citizens are made to undergo these hardships for the purpose of political propaganda. As a privileged, responsible citizen of the country, I urge you all to make an educated choice while electing the government for this nation. It has taken years of solidarity and brotherhood to have built a nation that we are proud of. 

I am sure we would call the world colourless if only saffron is to be seen.