The missing 4,007,707
Sanjib Baruah writes in his column for The Indian Express that the possibility — whether immediate or somewhat remote — that at the end of the process as many as 4 million people may lose their legal status as citizens should not be a cause of celebration in a democracy. Nor should it generate a mad rush among politicians competing for political credit.
In the contemporary global system, no state can act on illegal immigration unilaterally. Just because one state decides that a person is a citizen of another country, the other country is not obligated to accept that determination. One way in which governments act on deportation is to sign bilateral agreements for the readmission of nationals of the relevant country. Not only is there no such agreement between India and Bangladesh, by all indications India has never approached the subject of deportation with Bangladesh.
The public interest will be best served if our politicians now move to end the game of taking credit and assigning blame. The Supreme Court bench said on Tuesday that the complete draft NRC could not be the basis of any coercive action against anyone. The home minister has also given that assurance. But words are unlikely to give confidence to people whose names are not included. Citizenship is “the right to have rights.” Not to be included in the NRC is serious business. We are in uncharted territory.
Moving forward, we should not rule out amnesty. Surely, if we were considering giving citizenship to minorities on humanitarian grounds, it is not that much of a leap to consider that we expand our moral horizon and extend the humanitarian umbrella to others as well.
The trafficking bill can be misused against victims and activists
In her column for Hindustan Times, Ruchira Gupta says that while the Bill mentions that “trafficking in human beings may be for sexual and physical exploitation,” sexual exploitation is not mentioned either in the definitions section or in the criminal provisions. This vagueness in definitions gives more power to the police and judiciary, who will become the interpreters of the law.
Combined with powers of surveillance that the Bill bestows on the National Anti-Trafficking Bureau in the name of investigating cases and coordinating between law enforcement agencies and NGOs, it is likely to be used against victims and activists. Thousands of victims, many of them illiterate, will have to depend on the mercy of the thana (station) officer, to interpret the words in the Bill’s statement of objects, to even register a police complaint against their traffickers.
Interestingly, the Bill places the blame for trafficking exclusively on “poverty, illiteracy and lack of livelihood options,” and not in any way, shape or form, on sex/gender/caste inequality as a significant vulnerability to being trafficked. This lets the government off the hook in punishing buyers and traffickers for sexual exploitation. It also takes away any obligation to address the vulnerability of gender or caste inequality through increased budgets for marginalised groups.
Government data may show that child labour and sex trafficking have come down, but the flesh and blood experiences of millions of vulnerable girls will tell a different story.
By Invoking the Gandhi-Birla Equation, Modi Has Opened Himself up for Scrutiny
Venu Madhav Govindu writes in an article for The Wire that the summer heat has finally subsided but the political temperature is on the rise in India. The prime minister came to power in 2014, capitalising on a deep and justifiable revulsion against the corruption of the UPA dispensation and the inability of Manmohan Singh to stand up and be counted as a leader when it mattered. But the rosy narrative of hope and expectation has now collided against the bleak reality of life in India for the past four years and more.
By using historical analogy, the prime minister has unwittingly opened himself up for scrutiny against terms of his own definition. Firstly, the use of a Gandhi-Birla-also-did-it argument brings up associations of a highly dubious variety. In 2003, Dilip Singh Judeo, a minister in the Vajpayee government was caught accepting a bribe on tape. When questioned by the media, Judeo had brazenly argued that his taking of a bribe was much like Gandhi’s acceptance of financial contributions from G. D. Birla. Secondly, even if the Judeo incident is now largely forgotten, surely everyone is aware of the political ideology of the man who assassinated the Mahatma when he was a guest at Birla’s Delhi home.
If Narendra Modi believes that Gandhi was a voice to be followed in dealing with the Indian capitalist class, perhaps he should also pay attention to what the Mahatma had to say on the questions of communalism and citizenship.
Will he ensure that justice is delivered in the Rakbar Khan case and also take steps to ensure that the Meos of Rajasthan – and Muslims everywhere – can live without fear as equal citizens of the Republic of India?
The problem with our Constitution
Words are the most important invention of mankind, says Gautam Pingle in his column for New Indian Express. He writes that while most words have a straightforward meaning, there are words which are shorthand for concepts. We use these important word-concepts often but very lightly. Word-concepts are derived from the underlying experience and beliefs of people.
The Constitution makers were largely products of English education in India with some who had experience of higher education in Britain in politics, economics and law. The Constitution makers were remiss in not making clear what the important word-concepts in the Constitution actually meant. Some of the most important concepts introduced by the British rulers and adopted by our Constitution makers need to be analysed.
The loose usage of these three terms, “religion”, “equality” and “secularism”—part of the “basic structure” of the Constitution—indicate the difficulties in adopting word-concepts derived from Protestant Christian experience, now secularised and universalised. These metaphysical word-concepts, adopted by the English-speaking Constitution makers and inheritors, cannot be understood in Indic languages as they are outside the life experience of the Indic population.
Criminalising adultery reflects our hypocrisy over sex
The Supreme Court has struck the right cord by asking why at all adultery should be considered a crime, writes Vandana in an article for DailyO. She says that what shape and form two consenting adults want to give to their relationship is a completely private matter. Criminal codes should not be attached to civil matters. How a husband and wife want to deal with cheating is absolutely their prerogative and that is precisely the reason why adultery is considered a valid ground for divorce.
Many married couples are also known to ‘forgive and forget’ instances of ‘sex outside marriage’. Many ‘open marriages’ encourage it. Should the state still go after them because, in the eyes of the law, the party that cheated is an offender? In India, however, that offender, which the state pursues, is only the man because women can’t be criminally charged for adultery. But if a man wants to divorce his wife since she cheated on him, he can go ahead and do it.
Those talking about adultery themselves seem to have skipped the process of adulting. Sex between two individuals is not always about love. It is so often about a physical need, which biology tells us, must be taken care of. Those having sex outside marriage may not actually be cheating on their partners because they may not really be in love with the person they are hooking up with. But India is not the only country where adultery is a criminal offence.