India abandoning its founding principles with Citizenship Amendment Bill

The purpose is to create, through law, a permanent threat to hang over every single Muslim head in India, writes Mihir S Sharma.

For 70 years, India has struggled to remain a secular state. In spite of its people being overwhelmingly Hindu, it chose not to distinguish between its citizens–or putative citizens–on the basis of their religion. That principle was what its founding fathers fought for, and what for decades led it to proudly distinguish itself from Pakistan, born at the same time as India but explicitly as a homeland for Muslims.

The Hindu nationalist party of which India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party played no part in the popular struggle for independence. It has no reason to quarrel with the “two-nation theory” that holds that the Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent are always and forever two nations–the theory that Pakistan’s founders proposed and India’s founders rejected. Indeed, as far as the BJP is concerned, India is knit together by its Hindu heritage; India’s Muslim citizens are at best to be uneasily tolerated, and at worst to be seen as interlopers who belong in Pakistan.

This week, India’s parliament enshrined this worldview in law. It passed an amendment to India’s citizenship act that allowed a swift path to citizenship for refugees and migrants from certain neighboring countries–as long as they are Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Christian, Zoroastrian or Buddhist…

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Baseless Aadhaar and its many flaws: When the poor lose their thumb prints

When machines don't recognise their thumb prints, Aadhaar turns into a device of exclusion

 

Wardi Devi, a senior citizen, hails from a remote town of Rajasthan. She’s tried to enrol for the Aadhaar thrice and even paid Rs. 150 and Rs. 50 to agents while making the first two attempts. Tired of coughing out her hard earned money from her meagre wages, she refused to pay anything the third time. Despite having visited the Aadhaar centre on multiple occasions, she is yet to receive her UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India). Since she is not an Aadhaar Card holder, she is not entitled to subsidised food grains under the public distribution system (PDS). In the absence of an Aadhaar Card, she is also deprived of various other government entitlements, including the right to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Ninety-year-old Fefi Devi and her husband Nathu Singh haven't received ration from the local Fair Price Shop (FPS) ever since Aadhaar-based biometric authentication was introduced in their village, Kukerkheda in Rajsamand district of Rajasthan, in 2014. The Point-of-Sale (PoS) machine doesn’t recognise their thumb impressions since the lines on their thumbs have disappeared due to rigorous manual labour — their source of daily wages.

UIDAI — more commonly known as Aadhaar — which was introduced in 2009 is “essentially a paperless online anytime-anywhere identity assigned to a resident to cover his/her entire lifetime”. The project “assures” inclusion of the entire Indian population into various government entitlements and programmes from which citizen were often “wrongly excluded”. The project aims at making the downtrodden and underserved independent by removing the middlemen, thereby reducing corruption and challenges related to implementation. However, as is evident from the cases above, a number of people are losing out on their basic rights such as food and work.

Citizens are still in search of their identity

The Constitution guarantees both Fefi Devi and Wardi Devi the Right to Life and, hence, right to be included in government welfare schemes. However, a mandate like Aadhaar, for accessing these schemes, does not. If we dig a little deeper, we realise that the project’s initial claims were based on a basic misunderstanding of the causes for exclusion. Worse, the experience of the past eight years of the project suggests that nothing has changed, except the project itself has become a source of exclusion from government programmes for thousands. (READ FULL STORY)

Adityanath as UP CM: Uttam Pradesh or Yogi Pradesh?

Adityanath follows a strict work ethic but he'll be challenged by UP's dismal state-of-affairs

 

If the overwhelming mandate for the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh surprised many, the party’s choice of Chief Minister – Yogi Adityanath – shocked rival parties, media and some say, even many leaders within the party.

But many locals aren’t too surprised. They believe that Adityanath (named Ajay Singh Bisht by family) is the right person for the job because of his strong work ethic, lifestyle and of course, his credentials as a hindu hardliner.

His 12-by-12 room in the Gorakhnath temple just has one bed and a table. From personally feeding gud (jiggery) to almost 400 cows a day to holding a meeting with locals in the area every morning, Yogi Adityanath or baba, as he is popularly called in the area, has given personal attention to the area.

Baba’s followers believe that he can do no wrong. And even if he does it, it is for the larger good. For example, his daily meetings are held without any bias towards the rich or poor or if one goes by locals, any religion either. People waiting to meet the baba are fed lassi. There is just one condition: don’t lie to the baba. The offender is punished by allowing someone else to cultivate his land for months or could be harsher.

In these meetings, doles are given out for marriages, children’s education, disputes are resolved and so on. The best part: the meeting don’t end till the last person is heard. A local says that half of the disputes get resolved once one party says that he/she is going to baba for resolution.| READ MORE....