A sociology professor of a prominent college in Mumbai was approached by a few of her Muslim students last week. They seem troubled and full of anxiety. Their disturbing query: “How do we procure documents to prove that we are Indian citizens?”

The female professor, not a Muslim, was shocked. She said that they must concentrate on their studies and exams and not bother about these documents. However, they were adamant and restless, wondering from where there parents and grandparents will get the documents to prove their Indian identity.

Then the professor told them categorically and in a firm voice: “Don’t worry about the documents and the fear psychosis being spread all over. Concentrate on your studies. I too have no certificate. My mother too can’t prove her Indian identity except for the fact that we were born and brought up here and we are Indians and no power on earth can deny us this reality.”

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If this is the troubling phenomena in Mumbai, in a prestigious college with educated students coming from well-settled middle-class families, you can well imagine the state of the mind of people who are marginalized and voiceless, across the deep interiors of India’s rural, Adivasi and small-town landscape, and in the ghettos and slums of urban India.

Is it this vicious phenomena, so transparently negative and replete with hate politics, going to be the trump card of the BJP-RSS in 2024, with the majority population being forced to polarize in communal and xenophobic terms, almost like what Adolf Hitler did in Germany with the Jews, the Serbs did with the Muslims in Bosnia/Serbia and what the Israelis are doing on a daily basis in the occupied land of Palestine?

In many ways, the military occupation and siege of the Muslim population in Kashmir since August 5 seems to be the xenophobic model they are planning to apply in entire India. Besides, both the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) seem to be the test case for the BJP/RSS to profile, identify, ghettoise, isolate, imprison in detention centres and concentration camps and deport or throw out Muslims, and only Muslims, who have already been tacitly branded as ‘Second Class Citizens’.

People queue to check their names on the draft list of the National Register of Citizens in India’s north-eastern state of Assam.

This has been their perverse experiment in Gujarat after the state-sponsored genocide of innocent Muslim citizens in 2002 with Narendra Modi at the helm.  And this has been the RSS dream even during the freedom movement in which it did not participate.

However, if one community is in fear and social crisis, the entire society will be restless, unsure, on the brink. And this has been proved by the divisive NRC process in Assam.

This mass phobia was witnessed by this reporter in the interiors of Assam and in the borders of West Bengal and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of citizens, both Hindus and Muslims, including indigenous and ancient communities like the Rajbongshis and tribals, would run from pillar to post with tattered documents to prove their identities.

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A Muslim mother of 70 would be in jail declared as a ‘foreigner’ or a ‘D-Voter’  (Doubtful Voter) under the NRC process or by the Foreign Tribunals (allegedly manned by openly partisan BJP sympathisers), but her young adult sons and husband would be Indian.

A  Muslim husband of a starkly poor family would be in jail declared as a foreigner, but his brother would be a bonafide Indian citizen, even while there will be no food to eat in their bare hut and their girls would drop out of school or work as temporary daily wagers for sundry low paying jobs. An elderly Hindu Rajbongshi woman of over 60 was picked up by the police, but her husband was declared an Indian citizen. Such cases were rampant all over Assam.

Gauhati University students take part in a torchlight rally during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Bill.

In Assam many women found themselves pushed to the wall, mostly poor and illiterate women. In a rural society where documents are generally not preserved or procured, and where there are no education or birth certificates for women, how do they prove their identity? I met a young pregnant woman who spent months in jail and was released only after the intervention of the apex court. Her suffering cannot be measured in words.  Indeed, thousands of women are suffering in Assam, especially poor and uneducated women, and those who live in remote villages.

The village postmaster, the neighbours, or local sarpanch might know them, but where do they get the documents to prove that they were born and brought up in pre or post-independence India, after 1951, in that particular village or small town? Or, after the cut-off date of August 24, 1971, as per the Assam Accord signed by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, which is the cut-off date accepted by all concerned in Assam and by the NRC and the Supreme Court?

Another peculiar phenomenon in Assam is the annual devastation caused by the floods by the ferocity of river Brahmaputra which changes course routinely and submerges and destroys vast tracts of fertile land, forests, villages and bridges. Once the villages disappear underwater, and this is a recurring phenomenon, the villagers move into new settlements.  The floods most often destroy their documents and belongings too. So where do they get the evidence to prove their citizenship which has gone underwater?

No wonder, the multi-crore NRC project, under the supervision of the Supreme Court with the then chief justice Ranjan Gogoi at the helm, became a tragic and bureaucratic mess with tens of thousands of people suffering, most of them, Indian citizens by birth. Many rotted in jail and detention centres in abysmal conditions, some went into depression, ravaged mentally and emotionally, some actually died.

Prateek Hajela, the high profile bureaucrat who presided over this NRC process, was finally transferred by the Supreme Court to his home cadre, Bhopal. The man who followed was widely alleged to be a BJP sympathizer, and he too went on leave. Meanwhile, Gogoi retired, after a string of judgments by the apex court which went in favour of the ruling party, including the judgement on the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992.

‘Kill the Bill’ Protest held in Bengaluru against NRC, Citizenship (Amendment) Bill.

Predictably, almost 19 lakh people were declared as prospective non-citizens by the final NRC. More predictably, a large number of them turned out to be Hindus, Gorkhas, Bengali Hindus, Boro and other tribes, Rajbongshis and other indigenous communities. So much so, caught in terrible flux, with their hate politics having so brazenly boomeranged, the BJP/RSS started opposing the NRC publicly.

This is a blatant contradiction. It was BJP and Amit Shah which had publicly and repeatedly celebrated and welcomed the NRC by targeting the so-called “termites” and “illegal infiltrators”  – a metaphor which was widely interpreted as an attack on Muslims. Indeed, the termite metaphor became a ritualistic cliché used by Shah all over the country. However, with thousands of non-Muslims, tribals and Hindus now thrown out of the NRC, he does not know what to do with the metaphor or how to use it to further his hate politics.

Significantly, this kind of metaphor has been used in history to target the Jews in Germany as ‘vermin’ or ‘pests’. The Vietnamese people and its guerilla army were similarly branded when they were fighting the bloody massacres of the American army. It precisely means that the ‘vermin’ is an ‘enemy of society’, a termite which is eating it away from the inside, and thereby should be crushed, sanitized, eliminated, destroyed and brutalized. The only problem is that this vermin is nothing but huge communities and citizens who have been declared ‘enemies’ for no rhyme or reason by the masters of xenophobia, communalism and hate politics.

Indeed, since the NRC boomeranged, now they are pushing the CAB with opportunistic amendments in the North-east to appease the tribals and locals who are up in arms, in Assam and all over the North-east. So, how come only Muslims are branded as “infiltrators” despite being legitimate and bonafide Indian citizens, when Hindus, Sikhs. Buddhists and Parsis who are foreigners can quickly become Indian citizens? How come they are not branded as “illegal infiltrators”?  And what about other persecuted minorities:  the Ahmedias, Sufis and Shias in Pakistan, the Rohingyas in Burma, the Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka, including thousands of Tamil refugees in India?

Indeed, if refugees from other religions are allowed to become legitimate citizens of India, why not Muslims, Ahmedias and Tamils?

So who is a termite and who is an Indian citizen?

Meanwhile, the Federal US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in a significant statement, has said that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 is a “dangerous turn in wrong direction” and sought American sanctions against Home Minister Amit Shah if the bill is passed by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. It stated that it was deeply troubled over the passage of the bill in the Lok Sabha. “If the CAB passes in both houses of Parliament, the US government should consider sanctions against the Home Minister Amit Shah and other principal leadership,” the commission said categorically.

“USCIRF is ‘deeply troubled’ by the passage of the CAB, originally introduced by Home Minister Shah, in the Lok Sabha given the religion criterion in the bill. The CAB is a dangerous turn in the wrong direction; it runs counter to India’s rich history of secular pluralism and the Indian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law regardless of faith. – USCIRF

Undoubtedly, the CAB is a violation of  Article 14 of the Indian Constitution which declares “equality of all citizens” under the law outside religion, status, caste or creed. This has been consolidated by the Keshavanand Bharti case in the Supreme Court which has reaffirmed that the basic structure of the Indian Constitution just cannot be changed even by amendments in Parliament by a majority. Amit Shah and his big brother know this caveat. They know that the CAB can be struck down by the judicial process. And yet they are so vehement? Why?

This is because this is their trump card for 2024. Their only refuge and last resort in the face of all-round failure in the economic and social sphere. This is because their only politics is hate politics, social polarisation, communal division in society, and mindless Pakistan-bashing, so as to reap electoral benefits.  Hence, this organised hysteria with a communal bill which will destroy India’s plural secular Constitution and social fabric and turn it into a ravaged, fearful, and conflict-ridden ‘Hindu Rashtra’ replica, with a mass phobia, collective insecurity and incipient, simmering violence stalking the land.

Surely, India, the world’s largest secular democracy, deserves better.