EXPLAINED: What is the difference between NPR and Census? India
Sumeet KaulSumeet KaulUpdated Jan 01, 2020 | 16:46 IST
NPR requires cooperation from states, which makes the opposition to the drive by many non-BJP governments – at least 10 states have announced they won’t implement the NPR -- a headache for the NDA government.
Census nprThe Census of India collects information about all residents of India. (representative image) | Photo Credit: PTIKEY HIGHLIGHTSThe Union Cabinet on December 24 approved the allocation of Rs 3,500 crore for updating the NPRThe data for the NPR was first collected by the then Congress-led UPA government in 2010, and it is to be carried out every 10 yearsThe Census data does not aim to collect information about individuals but to give an overall picture of the status or condition of residents of India
Ever since protests broke out in various parts of the country over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December, the Modi government has accused the Opposition of misleading students and Muslims about the CAA, which is not applicable to Indian citizens. Critics of the Act, however, stress that not only is the CAA discriminatory as it makes religion as a basis for citizenship, but also that the contentious Act needs to be read in connection with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process. Taken together, the CAA and NRC will adversely and disproportionately impact Muslims, Opposition parties and protesters say.
The government, on its part, maintains that no final decision on the implementation of the NRC has been taken, and the Congress and other Opposition parties are jumping the gun.
While the CAA provides fast-track citizenship to non-Muslims from three neighbouring Muslim countries, the NRC is a process of verifying citizenship. So far, the NRC process has been carried out only in Assam. Union Home Minister Amit Shah and other BJP leaders and ministers have previously said that the NRC will be extended to the rest of the country, but since the anti-CAA protests have spread to newer areas, the NDA government has sought to de-link the CAA from the NRC, and has not provided a time-frame for carrying out the pan-India NRC drive.
Interestingly, amid these claims and counterclaims and unabated protests – or perhaps because of the intense controversy generated by the CAA-NRC -- the National Population Register (NPR) and Census, which is due in 2021, have come under renewed scrutiny. Some activists have even alleged that the NPR is really the NRC by another name.
So what is the NPR and is it linked to the Census in any way?
The difference between NPR and Census
The Union Cabinet on December 24 approved the allocation of Rs 3,500 crore for updating the NPR, which is essentially a list comprising the country’s “usual residents”. Such a resident is someone who has resided in a local area for at least six months or intends to reside in the locality for at least six months. It is meant to have the demographic and biometric details of every Indian resident at the national, state, district and village level.
Importantly, the NPR cannot be seen as a citizenship registration drive since it would include, for instance, any foreigner residing in a given locality for over six months.
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The NPR requires cooperation from state governments, which makes the opposition to the drive by several non-BJP governments – at least 10 state governments have announced they won’t implement the NPR -- a headache for the Centre.
Typically, no documents are required to be submitted for the NPR. Registering for the NPR, which can be done via the Aadhaar number, is mandatory. The data for the NPR was first collected by the then Congress-led UPA government in 2010, and it is to be carried out every 10 years.
However, unlike the Census, which is also a once-in-ten-years exercise, the history of the NPR is recent, and dates back to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime’s move in 2003 to make changes to the Citizenship Act, a decision that followed a defence review of the 1999 Kargil War.
The Census of India, on the other hand, collects information about all residents of India. The Census data does not aim to collect information about individuals but to give an overall picture of the status or condition of residents of India and the overall population trends. Census details of specific individuals are supposed to be secret.
The Census has both a ‘static’ and a ‘dynamic’ aspect. The static aspect presents the picture of a population or community at a given time (that is when the Census was conducted), while the dynamic part provides the demographic trends. In both aspects, however, the focus is not on the information collected from the individual.
The views expressed by the author are personal and do not in any way represent those of Times Network.
What is the difference between the NPR under Congress, BJP’s NPR-NRC-CAA and the Census?
Despite BJP’s attempts to delink NPR-NRC and Citizenship Act, it is clear that all three are inextricably connected.
What is the difference between the NPR under Congress, BJP’s NPR-NRC-CAA and the Census?
Prakash Singh/AFP | NRC logo from PIB
Dec 28, 2019 · 06:30 am
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
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As tends to happen whenever its policies are controversial and face some backlash, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has again tried to insist that its efforts are no different from those of the Congress-led regime that preceded it.
Union Minister Prakash Javadekar this week adamantly said that the National Population Register update planned for next year – which many have pointed out that, despite denials, is the first step on the path to a National Register of Citizens – was simply a continuation of a policy that the previous government also implemented.
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“The exercise will be identical to the one carried out by UPA, which you all welcomed,” Javadekar said on Tuesday.
BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya has, over a series of tweets, attempted to make the same point, that the National Population Register was first carried out by the Congress-led government.
So was the NPR a Congress policy? And was it always a pathway to the National Register of Citizens? And what does it have to do with Aadhaar?
What are NPR, NRC, Census and Aadhaar?
The National Population Register is a list of all “usual” residents of India, i.e. anyone who has lived in the country for more than six months regardless of their nationality. The list itself is compiled by sending surveyors to each household, where they will collect information about a number of different factors. The list of these factors has changed in the most recent iteration of the NPR.
The National Register of Citizens is a meant to be a list of all citizens of India, i.e. those who are considered Indian nationals and therefore get all the rights due to citizens. It is expected to be built on top of the NPR, by taking those who claim to be Indian in that data set and then publishing another list of “doubtful” citizens, who then have to prove their ancestry to the authorities.
The Census of India is a once-a-decade process of collecting information of all residents of India. The data collected during the census is not supposed to be about any individuals but instead to, through the various statistics, give us a picture of the condition of Indian residents. Census details about individuals is meant to be secret, unlike either NPR and NRC which are explicitly lists of individuals.
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity number linked to biometric data of Indian residents. It was meant to help make it easier to identify Indian citizens and deliver welfare measures to them, though over the years it has run into much controversy and its uses have expanded far beyond welfare.
The Citizenship Act amendments are legal provisions that add a religious test to India’s citizenship laws. They provide a pathway toward citizenship for illegal immigrants who are Hindu, Buddhist, Parsi, Jain or Christian – and pointedly not Muslims – coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan.
Why are we talking about them?
Protests have erupted all over India against the Citizenship Act amendments, which many people believe are unconstitutional since they add a religious test to India’s citizenship laws. The fear has been that, when combined with a National Register of Citizens, the Citizenship Act amendments would become a tool to harass Indian Muslims.
This is expected because there are lakhs of people in India without sufficient documentary evidence of their ancestry, but the belief is that the NRC-CAA combination will offer a literal get-out-of-jail card for non-Muslims without their documents, while Muslims are persecuted.
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As the protests began to expand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to convey that his government had never even contemplated carrying out an NRC – even though Home Minister Amit Shah had promised it over and over.
Just as the government was insisting it had no plans for an NRC, the Union Cabinet cleared an amount of Rs 3,900 crore for updating the National Population Register. This is when Javadekar insisted that the NPR has nothing to with the NRC and that it had been carried out by the previous government.
Did the Congress carry out NPR?
Yes indeed. The NPR process is grounded in changes to the Citizenship Act made in 2003 by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Those changes were themselves put in place based on the recommendations of the committee reviewing the fallout of the Kargil War of 1999, with fears of Pakistanis managing to enter India unnoticed.
Despite first being contemplated in 2003, not much movement took place until the Mumbai attacks of 2008, which revived those fears especially because the attackers in that case had turned up from Pakistan onto the Indian coast.
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This time the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government actually moved forward on building a National Population Register, until it ran into Aadhaar. For a few years, the UPA squabbled about which of these two policies were preferable as a way of enumerating Indian residents – since the early version of NPR involved issuing cards to individuals – before Aadhaar eventually won out.
The NPR, however, stuck around as a database. It was first put together in 2010 in conjunction with the Census, and then updated in 2015 by the Registrar General of India (the same office that carries out the census every decade). The current government is only aiming to update this database, not build it entirely from scratch.
Was the Congress’ NPR the first step towards an NRC?
Yes, on paper, but not in practice.
All the documentation of the NPR as it was carried out in the Congress years made it clear that it was the first step towards the creation of a National Register of Indian Citizens. This is partly because the parent law under which NPR operates is the Citizenship Act provisions from the Vajpayee years, which explicitly envisions the creation of a national identity card specifically for citizens of India.
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That said, the Congress-led government never actually made any move towards carrying out an NRC. Though it conducted the NPR in 2010, it never notified or began the process for designing a National Register of Indian Citizens.
Former Union Minister P Chidambaram, to whom the NPR push has been attributed, claimed this week that the NPR process carried out under the Congress was confined to residents and not citizens, which is accurate since there is no indication of any efforts towards an actual NRC.
So why is BJP’s NPR problematic if the Congress one wasn’t?
There are three big differences betwen the current NPR as envisioned by the BJP and the one that the Congress carried out.
The questions are different: As Scroll.in has reported, the pilot projects of this version of the NPR included the usual demographic details such as name, age, sex, relationship in household, and so on. But the NPR form also asks a respondent where his or her parents were born. If the process was purely meant to identify poor individuals for better welfare delivery, why would it need this information?
It seems evident that this question, as well as others seeking to include details of the individual’s Aadhaar number, voter ID, driver’s licence and mobile number will be used to then create a list of Indian citizens (and not just residents) as envisioned by the act. If the NPR had nothing to do with the NRC, it would not need to know where the respondents’ parents were born.
This is the clearest indication possible that for the BJP, the NPR process is indeed the first step towards an NRC, as the laws envision.
The Citizenship Act is in place, aka “understand the chronology”: Even if the Congress had used the NPR database to create a National Register of Indian Citizens, there would still be one big difference: The Congress never spoke about bringing in changes to the Citizenship Act that explicitly added a religious criteria to Indian citizenship laws to keep out Muslims.
Home Minister Amit Shah has been very clear, going so far as to tell the Indian public to “understand the chronology”, that an NRC in India would only be carried out after the Citizenship Act had been passed (which happened earlier this month). This was because the BJP wanted to avoid the example of Assam, where an NRC process led to the exclusion of 19 lakh residents – with many more Hindus being declared non-citizens than the BJP was hoping for.
If the Congress had carried out an NRC after conducting the NPR in 2010, it may have still been an extremely callous, bureaucratic process – but wouldn’t have carried with it the blatantly communal threat that is now in place thanks to the Citizenship Act.
The Congress chose a different bureaucratic nightmare: It is true that the Congress, once it carried out the NPR process, could have used that to create a National Register of Citizens. Indeed, the laws that allow for an NPR envision the creation of an NRC. Yet, the Congress did not.
One could attribute that to the benevolence of the Congress, but the fact is that this may have happened only because another project that was more relevant to the politics and impulses of the time won out: Aadhaar.
Unlike the BJP, the Congress did not have much to gain by demonising Indian Muslims, but it saw utility in the idea of generating huge datasets about Indian residents – regardless of citizenship – that would also be valuable to the private sector. Moreover, it sold this as a means of achieving “bureaucratic efficiency” in the welfare state, though in practice that has meant excluding some of the most vulnerable and passing this off as a gain.
So will there be an NRC under the BJP?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed that the word NRC was not even brought up after he came to power, which was a blatant falsehood. Union Minister Javadekar insisted that the NPR was not the first step towards an NRC, and that there were no plans to carry one out. The BJP’s supporters, sensing the opposition towards an NRC all over the country, have tried to insist that the government isn’t planning to carry one out.
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Yet no one from the government has explicitly said it will not carry out an NRC. There have been statements saying it does not intend to carry one out and that there are no plans to do so right now, but no one has come out to say that there will not be an NRC. And of course, it is worth remembering that Home Minister Amit Shah spent the last year telling Indians around the country that his government will carry out an NRC.
Indeed, though Javadekar said that the NPR is not the same as the NRC, as long as the exercise retains the questions about parents’ place of birth, it cannot be seen as anything but the first step towards a National Register of Indian Citizens. Indeed, there are some who argue that the NPR can never be delinked from the NRC because it exists as process under the Citizenship Act, which sees an NRC as a legal outcome.
If the government actually wanted to make it clear that it will not be conducting an NRC, it could make a statement to that effect. If the government wanted to insist that the NPR is not linked to the NRC, it would remove the questions about parents’ place of birth. Or it could pass a different law that empowers the government to build a register of residents that doesn’t rely on the Citizenship Act.
As long as none of these are carried out, the apprehension that the NPR will lead to an NRC is bound to remain.
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Once a picturesque town in the foothills of the Himalayas, Dehradun, the capital city of Uttarakhand, is now crumbling under rising population, rapid infrastructure development at the cost of ecologically sensitive areas, decaying water bodies and poor waste management.
The city’s inclusion in the Smart City Mission in 2017 has not been able to revive its fortunes much either. Situated between the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, the Dehradun valley is almost 70 km long. It has a history of being a fertile area abundant in agriculture and horticulture products, with the presence of dense jungles and scores of rivulets and canals making it a biodiversity-rich zone.
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Protesters at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh have shown remarkable tenacity in the face of enormous odds. | Sajjad Hussain/AFP
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The Bharatiya Janata Party’s official spokesman and head of its IT cell Amit Malviya has called the Citizenship Amendment Act protest as an “Islamist insurrection” and accused protesters of getting their “instructions from the masjid”. He has also alleged that the agitation is being used as a pretext to radicalise Muslim youth, including little children.
“Shocking! In the name of protests, depraved minds are exploiting the innocence of young kids, especially girls, for their propaganda and stirring animosity,” he tweeted with a video of a small girl shouting slogans at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh sit-in. “We have seen this kind of indoctrination among kids in radical Islamic societies. But in Shaheen Bagh?”
Amit Malviya
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@amitmalviya
Shocking! In the name of protests, depraved minds are exploiting innocence of young kids, especially girls, for their propaganda and stirring animosity..
We have seen this kind of indoctrination among kids in radical Islamic societies. But in #ShaheenBagh?
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Clearly, Malviya has no idea of what an “Islamist insurrection” looks like, and he should be careful about what he wishes for. The bare-knuckle strategy that his party and the government have chosen for dealing with protesters, calling them anti-national and proxies for India’s enemies, risks ending up doing precisely what it claims to be combating – that is, radicalising Muslims. The thrust of this strategy is to undermine and discredit protesters by portraying them as part of an “Islamist conspiracy”....
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Soon after Narendra Modi took over as prime minister of India in 2014, he decided to throw away one of the demands his own party had made in the campaign over the previous year: for the government to issue a White Paper that would examine the problems in the Indian economy.
Modi said in 2018 that he had decided not to do so because revealing the actual state of the government’s finances had the “potential to cause a crisis all over”.
In fact he went further.
“The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the Budget figures were suspicious.
“In the midst of this, imagine a White Paper coming out giving intricate details of the extent of damage. Instead of being a mollifier, it would be a multiplier of the distress.”
In other words, Modi decided that he would rather hide the reality of India’s economy – since revealing the truth might make things worse and get around to quietly fixing the mess instead.
Put that way, it sounds like a good thing.
Read it differently, however, and you see that Modi is advocating the suppression of truth and relying on the assumption that he knows what is best for the country, without consulting with experts and stakeholders and the public at large.
Nearly six years after he first took charge, this policy is clearly still in place.
Modi gets to decide what the public should know about the economy, no matter what the reality is. Over the last few years, questions have been raised about how Gross Domestic Product growth has been calculated, political interference in all sorts of economic reports and outright suppression of data that shows the government in a bad light.
But over the course of 2019, even the questionable numbers started reflecting how bad things were. At the start of that year, GDP growth was estimated at more than 7%. By the end, it was at 5%, and possibly even lower.
The fiscal deficit had been projected at 3.3%. In her Budget speech a week ago, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman triggered an “escape clause” so that this could be expanded to 3.8% – with no explanation.
One reason is a gigantic hole in tax collections this year. To make up for the shortfall, the Central government has been grabbing money from wherever it can: the Reserve Bank of India, small savings funds, by reducing its transfers to the states.
Listen to India’s top politicians though, and you would not get the sense that anything is wrong. Sitharaman’s Budget Speech, for example, had no acknowledgment of why things are this bad. Other politicians have claimed all questions about the economy are politically motivated jibes aimed at the prime minister.
Modi himself even explained this approach in a speech in Parliament on Thursday:
“Let me reassure you that India’s economy is strong. India is pursuing a dream of a $5 trillion economy with full speed and full potential...
There is no question of thinking small. Pessimism and gloom do not help us. We talk about a $5-trillion economy. Yes the aim is ambitious, but we have to think big and think ahead.”
By “pessimism and gloom”, of course, Modi means the exact sort of comments that he himself made about the economy when he was taking over.
As many economists have pointed out, Modi’s revelation from 2014 could be repeated word for word today and would be as accurate as it was then: “The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the Budget figures were suspicious.”
What does all this economic denialism get the Indian people? Maybe it will work. Maybe the economy is one big confidence trick, and that fixing things just means selling the right narrative, avoiding “pessimism and gloom.”
But there are two problems with that.
First, it is Modi’s policies over the last half-decade that have brought the Great Indian Slowdown. There is no evidence to suggest he can engineer a turnaround.
Second, even if he could, is that the country we want to live in? Where information is suppressed while one ‘Great Leader’ decides what is best for his subjects? Where economic policies are announced like Tughlaqi firmans, orders from the ruler with no accountability?
Modi is asking India’s 1.3 billion citizens to stick their heads in the sand, while he gets to describe what’s on the horizon. Thankfully, not everyone is doing so – or we wouldn’t be able to see the disaster that is approaching
Sumeet KaulSumeet KaulUpdated Jan 01, 2020 | 16:46 IST
NPR requires cooperation from states, which makes the opposition to the drive by many non-BJP governments – at least 10 states have announced they won’t implement the NPR -- a headache for the NDA government.
Census nprThe Census of India collects information about all residents of India. (representative image) | Photo Credit: PTIKEY HIGHLIGHTSThe Union Cabinet on December 24 approved the allocation of Rs 3,500 crore for updating the NPRThe data for the NPR was first collected by the then Congress-led UPA government in 2010, and it is to be carried out every 10 yearsThe Census data does not aim to collect information about individuals but to give an overall picture of the status or condition of residents of India
Ever since protests broke out in various parts of the country over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December, the Modi government has accused the Opposition of misleading students and Muslims about the CAA, which is not applicable to Indian citizens. Critics of the Act, however, stress that not only is the CAA discriminatory as it makes religion as a basis for citizenship, but also that the contentious Act needs to be read in connection with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process. Taken together, the CAA and NRC will adversely and disproportionately impact Muslims, Opposition parties and protesters say.
The government, on its part, maintains that no final decision on the implementation of the NRC has been taken, and the Congress and other Opposition parties are jumping the gun.
While the CAA provides fast-track citizenship to non-Muslims from three neighbouring Muslim countries, the NRC is a process of verifying citizenship. So far, the NRC process has been carried out only in Assam. Union Home Minister Amit Shah and other BJP leaders and ministers have previously said that the NRC will be extended to the rest of the country, but since the anti-CAA protests have spread to newer areas, the NDA government has sought to de-link the CAA from the NRC, and has not provided a time-frame for carrying out the pan-India NRC drive.
Interestingly, amid these claims and counterclaims and unabated protests – or perhaps because of the intense controversy generated by the CAA-NRC -- the National Population Register (NPR) and Census, which is due in 2021, have come under renewed scrutiny. Some activists have even alleged that the NPR is really the NRC by another name.
So what is the NPR and is it linked to the Census in any way?
The difference between NPR and Census
The Union Cabinet on December 24 approved the allocation of Rs 3,500 crore for updating the NPR, which is essentially a list comprising the country’s “usual residents”. Such a resident is someone who has resided in a local area for at least six months or intends to reside in the locality for at least six months. It is meant to have the demographic and biometric details of every Indian resident at the national, state, district and village level.
Importantly, the NPR cannot be seen as a citizenship registration drive since it would include, for instance, any foreigner residing in a given locality for over six months.
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The NPR requires cooperation from state governments, which makes the opposition to the drive by several non-BJP governments – at least 10 state governments have announced they won’t implement the NPR -- a headache for the Centre.
Typically, no documents are required to be submitted for the NPR. Registering for the NPR, which can be done via the Aadhaar number, is mandatory. The data for the NPR was first collected by the then Congress-led UPA government in 2010, and it is to be carried out every 10 years.
However, unlike the Census, which is also a once-in-ten-years exercise, the history of the NPR is recent, and dates back to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime’s move in 2003 to make changes to the Citizenship Act, a decision that followed a defence review of the 1999 Kargil War.
The Census of India, on the other hand, collects information about all residents of India. The Census data does not aim to collect information about individuals but to give an overall picture of the status or condition of residents of India and the overall population trends. Census details of specific individuals are supposed to be secret.
The Census has both a ‘static’ and a ‘dynamic’ aspect. The static aspect presents the picture of a population or community at a given time (that is when the Census was conducted), while the dynamic part provides the demographic trends. In both aspects, however, the focus is not on the information collected from the individual.
The views expressed by the author are personal and do not in any way represent those of Times Network.
What is the difference between the NPR under Congress, BJP’s NPR-NRC-CAA and the Census?
Despite BJP’s attempts to delink NPR-NRC and Citizenship Act, it is clear that all three are inextricably connected.
What is the difference between the NPR under Congress, BJP’s NPR-NRC-CAA and the Census?
Prakash Singh/AFP | NRC logo from PIB
Dec 28, 2019 · 06:30 am
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
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As tends to happen whenever its policies are controversial and face some backlash, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has again tried to insist that its efforts are no different from those of the Congress-led regime that preceded it.
Union Minister Prakash Javadekar this week adamantly said that the National Population Register update planned for next year – which many have pointed out that, despite denials, is the first step on the path to a National Register of Citizens – was simply a continuation of a policy that the previous government also implemented.
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“The exercise will be identical to the one carried out by UPA, which you all welcomed,” Javadekar said on Tuesday.
BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya has, over a series of tweets, attempted to make the same point, that the National Population Register was first carried out by the Congress-led government.
So was the NPR a Congress policy? And was it always a pathway to the National Register of Citizens? And what does it have to do with Aadhaar?
What are NPR, NRC, Census and Aadhaar?
The National Population Register is a list of all “usual” residents of India, i.e. anyone who has lived in the country for more than six months regardless of their nationality. The list itself is compiled by sending surveyors to each household, where they will collect information about a number of different factors. The list of these factors has changed in the most recent iteration of the NPR.
The National Register of Citizens is a meant to be a list of all citizens of India, i.e. those who are considered Indian nationals and therefore get all the rights due to citizens. It is expected to be built on top of the NPR, by taking those who claim to be Indian in that data set and then publishing another list of “doubtful” citizens, who then have to prove their ancestry to the authorities.
The Census of India is a once-a-decade process of collecting information of all residents of India. The data collected during the census is not supposed to be about any individuals but instead to, through the various statistics, give us a picture of the condition of Indian residents. Census details about individuals is meant to be secret, unlike either NPR and NRC which are explicitly lists of individuals.
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity number linked to biometric data of Indian residents. It was meant to help make it easier to identify Indian citizens and deliver welfare measures to them, though over the years it has run into much controversy and its uses have expanded far beyond welfare.
The Citizenship Act amendments are legal provisions that add a religious test to India’s citizenship laws. They provide a pathway toward citizenship for illegal immigrants who are Hindu, Buddhist, Parsi, Jain or Christian – and pointedly not Muslims – coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan.
Why are we talking about them?
Protests have erupted all over India against the Citizenship Act amendments, which many people believe are unconstitutional since they add a religious test to India’s citizenship laws. The fear has been that, when combined with a National Register of Citizens, the Citizenship Act amendments would become a tool to harass Indian Muslims.
This is expected because there are lakhs of people in India without sufficient documentary evidence of their ancestry, but the belief is that the NRC-CAA combination will offer a literal get-out-of-jail card for non-Muslims without their documents, while Muslims are persecuted.
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As the protests began to expand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to convey that his government had never even contemplated carrying out an NRC – even though Home Minister Amit Shah had promised it over and over.
Just as the government was insisting it had no plans for an NRC, the Union Cabinet cleared an amount of Rs 3,900 crore for updating the National Population Register. This is when Javadekar insisted that the NPR has nothing to with the NRC and that it had been carried out by the previous government.
Did the Congress carry out NPR?
Yes indeed. The NPR process is grounded in changes to the Citizenship Act made in 2003 by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Those changes were themselves put in place based on the recommendations of the committee reviewing the fallout of the Kargil War of 1999, with fears of Pakistanis managing to enter India unnoticed.
Despite first being contemplated in 2003, not much movement took place until the Mumbai attacks of 2008, which revived those fears especially because the attackers in that case had turned up from Pakistan onto the Indian coast.
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This time the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government actually moved forward on building a National Population Register, until it ran into Aadhaar. For a few years, the UPA squabbled about which of these two policies were preferable as a way of enumerating Indian residents – since the early version of NPR involved issuing cards to individuals – before Aadhaar eventually won out.
The NPR, however, stuck around as a database. It was first put together in 2010 in conjunction with the Census, and then updated in 2015 by the Registrar General of India (the same office that carries out the census every decade). The current government is only aiming to update this database, not build it entirely from scratch.
Was the Congress’ NPR the first step towards an NRC?
Yes, on paper, but not in practice.
All the documentation of the NPR as it was carried out in the Congress years made it clear that it was the first step towards the creation of a National Register of Indian Citizens. This is partly because the parent law under which NPR operates is the Citizenship Act provisions from the Vajpayee years, which explicitly envisions the creation of a national identity card specifically for citizens of India.
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That said, the Congress-led government never actually made any move towards carrying out an NRC. Though it conducted the NPR in 2010, it never notified or began the process for designing a National Register of Indian Citizens.
Former Union Minister P Chidambaram, to whom the NPR push has been attributed, claimed this week that the NPR process carried out under the Congress was confined to residents and not citizens, which is accurate since there is no indication of any efforts towards an actual NRC.
So why is BJP’s NPR problematic if the Congress one wasn’t?
There are three big differences betwen the current NPR as envisioned by the BJP and the one that the Congress carried out.
The questions are different: As Scroll.in has reported, the pilot projects of this version of the NPR included the usual demographic details such as name, age, sex, relationship in household, and so on. But the NPR form also asks a respondent where his or her parents were born. If the process was purely meant to identify poor individuals for better welfare delivery, why would it need this information?
It seems evident that this question, as well as others seeking to include details of the individual’s Aadhaar number, voter ID, driver’s licence and mobile number will be used to then create a list of Indian citizens (and not just residents) as envisioned by the act. If the NPR had nothing to do with the NRC, it would not need to know where the respondents’ parents were born.
This is the clearest indication possible that for the BJP, the NPR process is indeed the first step towards an NRC, as the laws envision.
The Citizenship Act is in place, aka “understand the chronology”: Even if the Congress had used the NPR database to create a National Register of Indian Citizens, there would still be one big difference: The Congress never spoke about bringing in changes to the Citizenship Act that explicitly added a religious criteria to Indian citizenship laws to keep out Muslims.
Home Minister Amit Shah has been very clear, going so far as to tell the Indian public to “understand the chronology”, that an NRC in India would only be carried out after the Citizenship Act had been passed (which happened earlier this month). This was because the BJP wanted to avoid the example of Assam, where an NRC process led to the exclusion of 19 lakh residents – with many more Hindus being declared non-citizens than the BJP was hoping for.
If the Congress had carried out an NRC after conducting the NPR in 2010, it may have still been an extremely callous, bureaucratic process – but wouldn’t have carried with it the blatantly communal threat that is now in place thanks to the Citizenship Act.
The Congress chose a different bureaucratic nightmare: It is true that the Congress, once it carried out the NPR process, could have used that to create a National Register of Citizens. Indeed, the laws that allow for an NPR envision the creation of an NRC. Yet, the Congress did not.
One could attribute that to the benevolence of the Congress, but the fact is that this may have happened only because another project that was more relevant to the politics and impulses of the time won out: Aadhaar.
Unlike the BJP, the Congress did not have much to gain by demonising Indian Muslims, but it saw utility in the idea of generating huge datasets about Indian residents – regardless of citizenship – that would also be valuable to the private sector. Moreover, it sold this as a means of achieving “bureaucratic efficiency” in the welfare state, though in practice that has meant excluding some of the most vulnerable and passing this off as a gain.
So will there be an NRC under the BJP?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed that the word NRC was not even brought up after he came to power, which was a blatant falsehood. Union Minister Javadekar insisted that the NPR was not the first step towards an NRC, and that there were no plans to carry one out. The BJP’s supporters, sensing the opposition towards an NRC all over the country, have tried to insist that the government isn’t planning to carry one out.
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Yet no one from the government has explicitly said it will not carry out an NRC. There have been statements saying it does not intend to carry one out and that there are no plans to do so right now, but no one has come out to say that there will not be an NRC. And of course, it is worth remembering that Home Minister Amit Shah spent the last year telling Indians around the country that his government will carry out an NRC.
Indeed, though Javadekar said that the NPR is not the same as the NRC, as long as the exercise retains the questions about parents’ place of birth, it cannot be seen as anything but the first step towards a National Register of Indian Citizens. Indeed, there are some who argue that the NPR can never be delinked from the NRC because it exists as process under the Citizenship Act, which sees an NRC as a legal outcome.
If the government actually wanted to make it clear that it will not be conducting an NRC, it could make a statement to that effect. If the government wanted to insist that the NPR is not linked to the NRC, it would remove the questions about parents’ place of birth. Or it could pass a different law that empowers the government to build a register of residents that doesn’t rely on the Citizenship Act.
As long as none of these are carried out, the apprehension that the NPR will lead to an NRC is bound to remain.
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Once a picturesque town in the foothills of the Himalayas, Dehradun, the capital city of Uttarakhand, is now crumbling under rising population, rapid infrastructure development at the cost of ecologically sensitive areas, decaying water bodies and poor waste management.
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The Bharatiya Janata Party’s official spokesman and head of its IT cell Amit Malviya has called the Citizenship Amendment Act protest as an “Islamist insurrection” and accused protesters of getting their “instructions from the masjid”. He has also alleged that the agitation is being used as a pretext to radicalise Muslim youth, including little children.
“Shocking! In the name of protests, depraved minds are exploiting the innocence of young kids, especially girls, for their propaganda and stirring animosity,” he tweeted with a video of a small girl shouting slogans at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh sit-in. “We have seen this kind of indoctrination among kids in radical Islamic societies. But in Shaheen Bagh?”
Amit Malviya
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@amitmalviya
Shocking! In the name of protests, depraved minds are exploiting innocence of young kids, especially girls, for their propaganda and stirring animosity..
We have seen this kind of indoctrination among kids in radical Islamic societies. But in #ShaheenBagh?
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Soon after Narendra Modi took over as prime minister of India in 2014, he decided to throw away one of the demands his own party had made in the campaign over the previous year: for the government to issue a White Paper that would examine the problems in the Indian economy.
Modi said in 2018 that he had decided not to do so because revealing the actual state of the government’s finances had the “potential to cause a crisis all over”.
In fact he went further.
“The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the Budget figures were suspicious.
“In the midst of this, imagine a White Paper coming out giving intricate details of the extent of damage. Instead of being a mollifier, it would be a multiplier of the distress.”
In other words, Modi decided that he would rather hide the reality of India’s economy – since revealing the truth might make things worse and get around to quietly fixing the mess instead.
Put that way, it sounds like a good thing.
Read it differently, however, and you see that Modi is advocating the suppression of truth and relying on the assumption that he knows what is best for the country, without consulting with experts and stakeholders and the public at large.
Nearly six years after he first took charge, this policy is clearly still in place.
Modi gets to decide what the public should know about the economy, no matter what the reality is. Over the last few years, questions have been raised about how Gross Domestic Product growth has been calculated, political interference in all sorts of economic reports and outright suppression of data that shows the government in a bad light.
But over the course of 2019, even the questionable numbers started reflecting how bad things were. At the start of that year, GDP growth was estimated at more than 7%. By the end, it was at 5%, and possibly even lower.
The fiscal deficit had been projected at 3.3%. In her Budget speech a week ago, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman triggered an “escape clause” so that this could be expanded to 3.8% – with no explanation.
One reason is a gigantic hole in tax collections this year. To make up for the shortfall, the Central government has been grabbing money from wherever it can: the Reserve Bank of India, small savings funds, by reducing its transfers to the states.
Listen to India’s top politicians though, and you would not get the sense that anything is wrong. Sitharaman’s Budget Speech, for example, had no acknowledgment of why things are this bad. Other politicians have claimed all questions about the economy are politically motivated jibes aimed at the prime minister.
Modi himself even explained this approach in a speech in Parliament on Thursday:
“Let me reassure you that India’s economy is strong. India is pursuing a dream of a $5 trillion economy with full speed and full potential...
There is no question of thinking small. Pessimism and gloom do not help us. We talk about a $5-trillion economy. Yes the aim is ambitious, but we have to think big and think ahead.”
By “pessimism and gloom”, of course, Modi means the exact sort of comments that he himself made about the economy when he was taking over.
As many economists have pointed out, Modi’s revelation from 2014 could be repeated word for word today and would be as accurate as it was then: “The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the Budget figures were suspicious.”
What does all this economic denialism get the Indian people? Maybe it will work. Maybe the economy is one big confidence trick, and that fixing things just means selling the right narrative, avoiding “pessimism and gloom.”
But there are two problems with that.
First, it is Modi’s policies over the last half-decade that have brought the Great Indian Slowdown. There is no evidence to suggest he can engineer a turnaround.
Second, even if he could, is that the country we want to live in? Where information is suppressed while one ‘Great Leader’ decides what is best for his subjects? Where economic policies are announced like Tughlaqi firmans, orders from the ruler with no accountability?
Modi is asking India’s 1.3 billion citizens to stick their heads in the sand, while he gets to describe what’s on the horizon. Thankfully, not everyone is doing so – or we wouldn’t be able to see the disaster that is approaching
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