Firstpost
  • Home
  • Video Shows
    Vantage Firstpost America Firstpost Africa First Sports
  • World
    US News
  • Explainers
  • News
    India Opinion Cricket Tech Entertainment Sports Health Photostories
  • Asia Cup 2025
Apple Incorporated Modi ji Justin Trudeau Trending

Sections

  • Home
  • Live TV
  • Videos
  • Shows
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Health
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • Web Stories
  • Business
  • Impact Shorts

Shows

  • Vantage
  • Firstpost America
  • Firstpost Africa
  • First Sports
  • Fast and Factual
  • Between The Lines
  • Flashback
  • Live TV

Events

  • Raisina Dialogue
  • Independence Day
  • Champions Trophy
  • Delhi Elections 2025
  • Budget 2025
  • US Elections 2024
  • Firstpost Defence Summit
Trending:
  • Nepal protests
  • Nepal Protests Live
  • Vice-presidential elections
  • iPhone 17
  • IND vs PAK cricket
  • Israel-Hamas war
fp-logo
Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC are two sides of same coin; both seek to alienate India’s Muslims
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter
Apple Incorporated Modi ji Justin Trudeau Trending

Sections

  • Home
  • Live TV
  • Videos
  • Shows
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Health
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • Web Stories
  • Business
  • Impact Shorts

Shows

  • Vantage
  • Firstpost America
  • Firstpost Africa
  • First Sports
  • Fast and Factual
  • Between The Lines
  • Flashback
  • Live TV

Events

  • Raisina Dialogue
  • Independence Day
  • Champions Trophy
  • Delhi Elections 2025
  • Budget 2025
  • US Elections 2024
  • Firstpost Defence Summit
  • Home
  • Politics
  • Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC are two sides of same coin; both seek to alienate India’s Muslims

Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC are two sides of same coin; both seek to alienate India’s Muslims

Angshuman Choudhury and Suraj Gogoi • December 17, 2019, 15:15:40 IST
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter

If the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the graveyard of Indian citizenship, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 is the graveyard of Indian democracy

Advertisement
Subscribe Join Us
Add as a preferred source on Google
Prefer
Firstpost
On
Google
Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC are two sides of same coin; both seek to alienate India’s Muslims

If the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the graveyard of Indian citizenship, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 is the graveyard of Indian democracy. Both are organically related and cannot be read without. The citizenship crisis in Assam, now set to engulf the entire country, will forever change life, politics and social theory in South Asia. The regime might understate and dismiss it on technicalities, but with the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2019 by both houses of the Indian Parliament, we are being handed a new social contract. It is a new path, a new beginning for our democracy, one that makes our future an abyss. If the secular fabric of our Constitution is destroyed and the norms of citizenship are changed, which has already happened, we are no longer what we were. The face of the crisis is this abyss. As once rightly noted by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, democracy is no measure for nature of states. Today Indian democracy seems to have proven that just right by showing how basic fabric of a democracy can be destroyed through the system itself. [caption id=“attachment_7780681” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] ![Protestors take part in a hunger strike organised by All Assam Students Union (AASU) in protest against the passing of Citizenship Amendment Act. PTI](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CAB_380_PTI_2.jpg) Protestors take part in a hunger strike organised by All Assam Students Union (AASU) in protest against the passing of Citizenship Amendment Act. PTI[/caption] There is an organic link between the NRC and CAA, which must be understood in the current context. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin with a similar political framework of exclusion. If CAA came out of the Hindu supremacist hearth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its allies, the NRC is the product of decades of xenophobia and chauvinism cultivated in Assam. Both have an inherently fascist, exclusivist logic. While NRC sought to exclude all “non-Assamese outsiders” from the citizenship framework, CAA aimed to exclude only the Muslims amongst them. One caters to pan-Indian Hindu nationalism, the other gives life to Assamese ethno-nationalism. The leader of the Assam Movement (1979-85) galvanised all kinds of chauvinism and communalism that was already a part of our society and turned it into a mass movement. Decades later, NRC legitimised those mutual feelings. It is a well-known fact that the so called ‘Bangladeshi’ was the foreigner who was to be expelled, even exterminated. They say the Assamese were finally infused with some hope with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. However, what is often underplayed is that the events and outcomes of the 1980s injected Assamese nativism and the image of an “illegal Bangladeshi” in a much broader way into the public imagination. The curriculum around these found its way into classrooms, radios and streets before it found new meaning in the NRC machine. Something similar happened as a result of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s. The idea of India as an exclusive nation or ‘homeland’ for the Hindus took centre stage in the public discourse. It became a serious topic of discussion amongst the mainstream intelligentsia and political class, particularly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Even the so-called secular forces began emulating the Hindu supremacist impulse. That story of saffron mobilisation and proliferation now finds one of it’s greatest logical conclusions in the passing of the CAB. In Assam, the opposition to the NRC is beyond the anti-secular or unconstitutional remit of the Act. It is a linear progression from the events of the 1980s, of the deeply-entrenched public imagination that Assam will be swept away by Bangladeshi immigrants. It is this absolutist position against immigrants that now stands pitted against the divisive Hindu-Muslim communalism of the BJP and Sangh. If the progressive Assamese ethno nationalists speak of the economic-cultural precarity of the indigenous people and the fear of the “Bengali outsider”, the BJP and others push the idea of war of civilisations and the idea of the Muslim immigrants as “infiltrators”. It is a battle between one template of otherisation versus another. This hate for the bidexi (foreigner) has driven the protests to a point where we see a peculiar situation on the streets of Assam that mirrors the tumultuous days of the Assam Movement. From torchlight marches to slogans written on the gamusa (traditional Assamese scarf) with blood, history is being repeated with aesthetic precision. The singular reason why the BJP’s communal citizenship project is dangerous in the Assamese context is not because it will suddenly flood the state with “illegal Hindu Bangladeshis” (the CAA regularises only a section of the existing Hindu Bengalis, with a cut-off date of 31 December 2014). It is because the amendment threatens to tear apart the brittle stability of the state. It is not Narendra Modi, Amit Shah or Mohan Bhagwat who will suffer, for their fortunes are sealed safely in the larger national context, but the minority Bengali-speaking populations in Assam who will now have to live in a climate of fear, suspicion, uncertainty and simmering rage. It is not that they are new to such fatal churnings, but the tides of time had kept the lid on the bottle tightly fastened for sometime now. The CAA will now open this lid and let the ghosts of the past out. Fair to say that Assamese nationalism is entering a new phase of assertion and praxis, and so is the vulnerability that Assam’s minorities reel under every day. Suraj is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Angshuman is a Senior Researcher, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Delhi.

Tags
Congress BJP Narendra Modi Rajya Sabha NewsTracker Assam Lok Sabha Manipur Guwahati Dispur North East Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Dibrugarh Tripura Assam Police Tinsukia Assam government Amit Shah Jorhat CAB NRC north eastern states Sarbananda Sonowal Citizenship (Amendment) Bill Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Assam protests Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 CAB Bill 2019 Protests in North East CAB in India
End of Article
Latest News
Find us on YouTube
Subscribe
End of Article

Top Stories

Israel targets top Hamas leaders in Doha; Qatar, Iran condemn strike as violation of sovereignty

Israel targets top Hamas leaders in Doha; Qatar, Iran condemn strike as violation of sovereignty

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Who is CP Radhakrishnan, India's next vice-president?

Who is CP Radhakrishnan, India's next vice-president?

Israel informed US ahead of strikes on Hamas leaders in Doha, says White House

Israel informed US ahead of strikes on Hamas leaders in Doha, says White House

Israel targets top Hamas leaders in Doha; Qatar, Iran condemn strike as violation of sovereignty

Israel targets top Hamas leaders in Doha; Qatar, Iran condemn strike as violation of sovereignty

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Who is CP Radhakrishnan, India's next vice-president?

Who is CP Radhakrishnan, India's next vice-president?

Israel informed US ahead of strikes on Hamas leaders in Doha, says White House

Israel informed US ahead of strikes on Hamas leaders in Doha, says White House

Top Shows

Vantage Firstpost America Firstpost Africa First Sports
Latest News About Firstpost
Most Searched Categories
  • Web Stories
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • IPL 2025
NETWORK18 SITES
  • News18
  • Money Control
  • CNBC TV18
  • Forbes India
  • Advertise with us
  • Sitemap
Firstpost Logo

is on YouTube

Subscribe Now

Copyright @ 2024. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved

About Us Contact Us Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Terms Of Use
Home Video Shorts Live TV