CHANDIGARH, India
For 17 years since he resigned from India’s elite bureaucratic service, Harsh Mander has made activism his mission to fight on issues ranging from dignity of persons with disabilities, the right to food and protection of tribals and downtrodden.
India’s official National Human Rights Commission had appointed Mander as a special monitor to look at the matters related to the communal riots and minorities. As a special monitor, he visited detention centers meant for “doubtful citizens” in the northeastern state of Assam. He resigned recently from this position citing a lack of response from the rights panel on his report on the conditions of detention camps.
Mander has turned out one of the major voices against India’s new citizenship law, believed to be discriminatory against Muslims. As soon as the law was adopted by the parliament, he gave a call for mass civil disobedience, pledging to register himself as Muslim and provide zero documentation for the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC).
In an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency, Mander, currently the director of the Centre for Equity Studies, a research organization based in New Delhi, said the citizenship crisis would lead to a constitutional crisis in the country.
Anadolu Agency: Sometime back you had alerted the National Human Rights Commission to the prospect of Assam facing a Rohingya-type crisis? Why did you feel so?
Harsh Mander: In Assam, once you go through the National Register of Citizens process, you will declare people as illegal immigrants or foreigners. Whatever may be the rhetoric, there is no plan even for them to return to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government will never accept people who do not claim to be Bangladeshi. You have detention centers. But are you going to put hundreds of thousands of people in them, like German concentration camps? So, what you are likely to do at the end of this. Is that you allow the people to continue to live in the same communities, but as a marked people stripped of citizenship rights? These are the questions haunting me. And there are no answers.
Detention centers are hell-like
Q: You visited the detention centers, meant for those declared as doubtful citizens as a special monitor. What are their conditions and what type of people have been kept in these centers?
HM: Detention centers are hell-like places because there were jails within jails and they do not have even the rights of a murder convict. They do not get parole, they are not allowed to move around the courtyard, and families are separated so the wife is kept at one detention center and husband in another. They are not even allowed to communicate with each other. And most worryingly, since Bangladesh will not accept them, their detention was potentially indefinite. That is the situation I saw.
Q: What happens to children when their parents are in a detention center?
HM: The government does not care. They should be treated under the Juvenile Justice Act as children need care and protection. This is the right of all children, regardless of whether or not they are citizens. But nobody in government has taken that responsibility.
Q: You have visited several areas of the state of Uttar Pradesh [UP], where the violence took place recently during protests against citizenship law. The state has a history of frequent communal riots. How these current riots were different from previous ones?
HM: Uttar Pradesh represents a new low in the communal targeting of minorities, particularly Muslims by the state. We have long observed cases of communal bias by the state and the police. But in Uttar Pradesh, we have a chief minister who has a long history of hate speeches and raising a Hindu militia. He talks about taking revenge against protestors, and thereby encourages, even incites his police forces, to indulge in direct communal target and violence of Muslims. That is completely unacceptable, and indeed within the threshold of a crime against humanity.
- Recent communal riots had different pattern
Q: You are stating that police have done excesses in Uttar Pradesh. What are impressions, you gathered from the ground?
HM: During our visit to the state, we saw wealthy Muslim homes smashed. We saw everything broken. This is a sight I have seen earlier in major communal riots such as in 1984 and 2002, but earlier this was done by the rioters while the police used to remain to stand by. But here it was done by the uniformed police itself. The police itself became rioter, the lynch mob. This is really is something which I had never seen, except for what people in Kashmir have endured for three decades, and also in the Northeast. This kind of communal targeting by police forces is intensely dangerous for the survival of secular democracy and the rule of law. There was a sense of extreme despondency among the people there. When the police itself became a lynch mob, then where will be people go for protection?
Q: The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) has been notified. It has become law now. You had opposed it tooth and nail. What is your reaction and road map now to oppose the law?
HM: I fear that the government is displaying both hubris and a stubborn determination to pursue its ruinous agenda at all costs to the country and its people. It insists on ignoring so many spontaneous and spirited protests of a scale that the country has not seen for a long time now. If the government respected democratic sentiment, it should have shown sensitivity and humility by keeping the notification of the highly contested law, which protestors fear destroys the constitution, in abeyance. There could have invited further public discussion; they could have ended the concerns of dissenting people by opening citizenship to all persecuted people of every religious identity, for all our neighboring countries, and not persisted with keeping out people of one religious identity, from the protections of the law. But, the government wants to communicate the message to its people that it does not respect dissent, even if expressed non-violently.
Citizenship law to create tussle between center and states
Q: You have said that the new citizenship law is linked to the NRC exercise poses the gravest threat to India’s secular democratic constitution. The NRC is meant for updating of citizens list. Why you oppose it?
HM: The core of the idea of India was that it would be built as a country that would secure equal rights to people of various identities. India would be an inclusive and humane nation. The combination of CAA- NRC-and National Population Register (NPR) has created for the first-time different rights for people of different religious identities. Therefore, it needs to be opposed in every way and form.
Q: It seems protests against new citizenship law and the nationwide NRC has not deterred the government. What is the roadmap to continue build pressure on the government?
HM: These protests are not organized by anyone. Their greatest strength is that they are spontaneous and decentralized. I sense that these protests will continue for now. I think the pressure will be on state governments now to refuse to implement the NRC and the NPR. This will ultimately create a constitutional crisis because the union government is determined to implement it and state after state is now refusing to implement it. The union government will use more and more of the kind of brute force to suppress the protests as we saw in UP, JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University], Jamia [Millia Islamia University], AMU [Aligarh Muslim University]. But in the end, the constitution and the idea of a kind and inclusive India must be defended at all costs. We must be determined and stay united.
