The CAA - NRC protest

This has been on my mind in the last five days. Through the stupid sickness which has put me through difficulties, the mind has always been on this.

"I'm not safe in this country anymore, I do not know whether my friends will be Indians, I do not know anything in this country", this voice of the young Jamia girl crying is repeating in my mind again and again and again. 

I have read, re-read every available article on this! Though I'm completely against this government,  have listened to their side of the stories too. I even sincerely listened to H. Raja, Adv. Sai Deepak and a few of their other intellectuals as well. Not to say, last night I even had dreams on this.

May be it is time I take my mind off this before it starts affecting my mental health. I seriously don't know whether it is even right to be thinking along these lines, when the country I so love is bleeding. Alright, I will leave my rant for another day. Will come straight to the point now. 

I'm not here to explain in detail again why I believe CAA in itself is discriminatory and put it along with the NRC it is really dangerous. Also not here to explain why they have to be seen together and the Home minister of the country has said umpteen times that they are to be seen together with or without the nitty gritty of the law. 

But, I'm here to talk about a thing called 'State capacity'. Now that the NRC exercise is done in Assam, with 19 lakh people have been said to not have documents to prove citizenship. So these 19 lakh people went from pillar to post to get whatever documents they could and yet could not convince the officials on the veracity of the documents. What next for them? They go for an appeal says the government. So they appeal in the high court and then to the supreme court. So 19 lakh more cases on the already burdened courts. How do you even monitor the 19 lakh people now? Even if one case is adjudged in a day it will take 14 years to finish off all the cases. 

Alright, let us imagine the worst case scenario that all 19 lakhs are proven by the courts to be foreigners, Bangladesh is not going to take them back. So we have to keep them in concentration centres. As coldly as it may sound, how are we going to build concentration centres to hold 19 lakh people and how much are we going to spend on building them. The biggest jail in India, the Tihar jail holds 11000 odd inmates though it was built to hold 5000 inmates. So are we going to build 172 jails of the size of Tihar in Assam alone? Tihar is 400 acres big! So are we going to build 70,000 acre worth of concentration centres and jails? Never forget, this is just in the Assam, and we have 29 more states. 

Okay! So now that we have built so much more jails and every illegal immigrant is put in, what next? Who will guard them? Who will fund their food? Or do we plan to let them rot to die? 

Okay, let me calm down a bit. Not go overboard. Let us just imagine the NRC is passed by the government and in the best case scenario asks every citizen to go to a government official to prove his citizenship using any document he has. Though the home minister has categorically said even voter ID and Aadhar should not be used, I will give benefit of doubt to him. Let us assume, we are told any document is fine. We just have to show it to them officials concerned. 

We are 133 crore Indians now. Since Assam is already done, we are 130 crore more people to finish off the process.Let us imagine there are 1,00,000 govt officials given entirely to do this process. They are very efficient and each person finishing off the work of 20 people every day working 10 hours a day. It will take almost a year for everybody to finish off the process! By that time India will add another 1.5 crore more people. 

Of course we should take into account the amount of money spent by the state on this process. Some reports say it will be approximately 55000 crores. This is without the amount of money and time spent by the people of the country in running around to prove citizenship. 

As somebody who loved policy making and want to study public policy at some point in life, a government which has not thought through the STATE CAPACITY to implement a law has no right to pass the law in the first place. 

As I was about to sleep yesterday night, one picture came haunting by! One beggar was sifting through shoes left by people as they ran helter- skelter during yesterday's police lathi charge in the protests in Delhi. That my dear people is this country. He does not care one bit about citizenship! All he cares for is shoes to protect himself from the cold of the night.