The Game Called NRC

by Mrinal Talukdar

The National Register of Citizen (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have redefined India forever. If for some, the NRC is an absolute necessity in India to weed out the illegal migrants, but for a large section, it is a matter of not only gross human right violation but also ‘religious persecution’ in disguise. The world is largely shocked as India attempted a pan India NRC after the successfully bringing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). India might have tried to handle all these by projecting NRC-CAA as an ‘internal matter’. But in summary, the hardcore militant Hindutva of new India has not gone down well with rest of the world. Even a Prime Ministerial denial of a pan India NRC did not cool off the heat till COVID-19 changed the World dynamics forever. The damage is much more within India as it is now broadly divided into two sides, pro and anti NRC-CAA. But there is a third side. That is the Assam, where it had all begun. For the world, this has been an unbelievable exercise of making 1.9 million people stateless by a Judiciary driven exercise of the State, parallel of what is nowhere to be seen in any parts of the world. All the political parties have tried to gain mileage out of it without working on a tangible solution. They had turned the infiltration issue as a milking cow. This book is just documentation of this humongous project in Assam. Never in the history of India, such a mammoth project was conducted. Sadly now nobody is willing to take it home. But we thought it must be documented for posterity. Because next-generation may find it difficult to believe that nine million people of Assam had moved from one place to another to prove their citizenships and individually spent shocking amounts of money to procure the long lost papers needed to prove their citizenship and in the process ruining thousands of families and killing many and not to mention of the Rs 1,500 crores expenditures from the state exchequer to make a list of citizen which make nobody happy. We can only pray the future generation of Assamese will not look up to this generation of Assamese "as optimists of the highest order or the greatest idiots in human history or the both."

290 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 22, 2020