In India—which has a history of partition on the basis of religion and ethnicity—concerns about mass migration, porous borders and terrorist infiltration have prompted successive governments to dabble in the idea of sifting out illegal residents.
But who is an Indian resident and who is an Indian citizen? Several prime ministers, including Rajiv Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, have asked their home ministers, in vain, for an answer. So, when Home Minister Amit Shah rose to tell Parliament that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be implemented nationwide, he was not the first to do so.
While Shah had multiple points to defend the NRC, his bureaucrats and intelligence agencies perhaps did not tell him, at least in detail, why such an exercise had so far been unsuccessful.
Back in 2003, then deputy prime minister and home minister L.K. Advani told the consultative committee of the home ministry that his government was serious about implementing the Multipurpose National Identity Cards (MNIC) project. The objective was to prepare a National Population Register and a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC).
A few years earlier, the Kargil Review Committee had recommended compulsory registration of citizens and non-citizens because there was illegal immigration. The Citizenship Act, 1955, was amended and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 were framed. The rules included the NPR, its implementation and how it would form the basis of the NRIC. The objective was to issue national identity cards to citizens and multipurpose residence cards to non-citizens.
There was initial resistance by several states, but a pilot project was soon launched in a dozen states. Bureaucratic hurdles and delays, however, dragged the project into the UPA government’s tenure.
After Shivraj Patil became home minister in 2004, there were concerns within the home ministry about the MNIC project creating two sets of people—citizens and non-citizens. Patil had to ease off and declare that the Centre was not keen on implementing the project in its original form. He said every person in the country would be provided a national identity card and be given a unique national identity number. “The project neither had a clear direction nor timeframe and virtually went into cold storage,” said a census official.
The 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, in 2008, brought the idea back on the table. Then home minister P. Chidambaram fast-tracked a project to prioritise identification of people living in border and coastal areas under the NPR by 2010, without waiting for the 2011 census.
At one of the meetings with census officials, Chidambaram reportedly said that the country could not count its citizens till it knew who its residents were. The stakeholders agreed, and it was decided that the NPR would have to be the bedrock and the NRIC could only be its subset.
Former home secretary G.K. Pillai, who rolled out the NPR exercise in 2010, said that while the NPR was supposed to list the residents based on census figures for security reasons, a simultaneous project—Aadhaar—was formed under the Unique Identification Authority of India. The UIDAI was under the Planning Commission and Aadhaar was to be used to roll out benefits of government schemes.
Bureaucratic wrangling, a race for funds, duplication of efforts and questions of authenticity led to an intervention by the home ministry. “Finally, both were allowed to continue and both captured the biometric data of residents, and provisions were made to eliminate any overlap,” said Pillai. “While the NPR was based on census figures and the enumeration was house to house, which took each unit (family) into account, Aadhaar was issued to each resident and, with its minimum qualification of three months (to be a resident), it got distributed loosely (even illegal migrants got it). There was also no way to determine whether a set of residents belonged to the same unit.”
In 2015-16, the NPR was updated for the entire country, except Assam. Census officials said that it had enlisted around 110 crore people.
In the run-up to the 2021 census, Shah is keen to update the NPR again, and the cabinet approved 03,941 crore for this on December 24.
The data collection for NPR would take place alongside the house-listing phase of the census, except in Assam. Along with the paper enumeration, census officials will carry a phone to record data for the NPR. There will be an app that would automatically transfer the NPR data to the main server. The officials are also expected to be paid more than before, said an official.
The 2021 census, along with the updated NPR, is expected to give the government a database of residents. The reason several states are opposing the NPR today is the fear that it will once again form the basis for the pending NRIC exercise.
Interestingly, Shah said on December 24 that the NPR and the NRIC were not linked, and that NPR data cannot be used for the NRIC in any way. His claims seem to be at odds with the census website, which linked the NPR with the NRIC.
“If the home ministry had learnt its lessons and taken a leaf out of the Assam Accord, this fear would not have been born,” said an official associated with the Assam NRC. “The Assam Accord said those who came from Bangladesh between 1966 and 1971 would have to register themselves with the Foreigners Regional Registration Officer, and will be included in the NRC, but will not have voting rights for 10 years from the date of registration.”
And herein lies the middle path. “The effort can only be forward-looking hereon, where the government does not check people’s antecedents, but rather gives a cut-off date and announces that anyone coming into the country hereafter cannot become an Indian citizen automatically,” said the official. “And people whose antecedents are not established in any way can be counted as citizens, but would be deprived of their voting rights for a certain period till the security agencies determine that the person has no criminal record.”
As the NRIC appears to be on the back burner for now, the home ministry and security agencies will continue to toy with many cards. However, be it Aadhaar, PAN, voter ID or passport, none of them give the government a single database of legal citizens, unlike in the US, where there is one social security number given to each resident, said a home ministry official. Also, each of these documents has faced legal scrutiny at some stage, the official added.
In the past week or so, thousands across the country have hit the streets to voice their dissent and about 20 have died in clashes with the police.
The lessons for the home ministry are many. First, it missed the fact that the ethnic struggle in Assam was not the sole touchstone for NRIC. Second, the attempt to create two sets of citizens under the NRIC was too emotive an issue for Indians. And any attempt to colour it with religion could make it a tinderbox.
