Though human ideals’ path has been blocked, or looks blocked, let us begin with an ideal. Ideally speaking—and let us hope “IDEALLY speaking” can still not be totally banned in the current world: for ever since humans became food-producers due to which they separated from the other animals, and rose above them, humans have harbored many IDEALS, viz., becoming self-sufficient in food-production; organizing irrigation, clearing the land for agriculture; creating cities; bringing water-supply to every house; electrifying the countries; making houses…
The IDEALS held by humankind through different periods of history have been innumerable; and though many necessary IDEALS have not been achieved yet, humankind has made unimaginable progress in achieving innumerable IDEALS nonetheless.
So, IDEALLY speaking, in the current epoch of “global village”, global culture, communication, global economy, science, technology, the stock and store of all the knowledge discovered by humankind so far, etc., everybody ought to be counted as a citizen of the world; citizen of global humanity; and, therefore, free to choose wherever he/she wishes to go, study, settle, and work for the welfare of himself/herself, his near a dear ones, entire humanity, and environment and ecology of the world!
This, however, looks like a far distant prospect.
It needs the Unity of the world’s human beings into One Humandom—which in turn depends upon the end of wars and exploitation of a vast mass of people by a few other people within each locality, community, region, country or the entire world.
We currently have communities, regions, and countries that present a panorama of very backward to very advanced sections.
While, for example, the USA is a very advanced country that has 45 million immigrants, including 5.4 million South Asians [4.4 million Indians], most of who have been naturalized, we also have a backward Assam, where 1.9 million people [many of them Assamese and others Indians themselves] have been decried as stateless and many of who might be shifted to ghettoes, and the fixed assets and other property they have acquired by hard labor or service to the country, likely to be….
The following case of South Asia is presented here as a specimen of the local issues regarding citizenship and freedom.
The Crimes of Pakistan Bosses
In 1951, 33.7 million people lived in what is now Pakistan and 42 million in what is now Bangladesh. The budget allocation up to 1970 for Bangladesh was 31% (1955–1960) to 46.4% (1950–1955) [40.5% in aggregate between 1950–1970] of the total budget allocation in Pakistan. There were other discriminations and crimes too against the Bangladeshis.
25 March, 1970: In order to “PRESERVE PAKISTAN’S territorial integrity and ISLAMIC IDEOLOGY” Yahya Khan announced a Legal Framework Order (LFO) on 25 March, 1970, which called for direct elections for a unicameral legislature.
12 November, 1970: A cyclone hit East Pakistan and killed about 500000 men, women and children. The rulers in the West Pakistan did almost nothing in terms of rescue operations.
7 December 1970: Caring not a hoot about the people devastated by the cyclone, general elections were held in both parts of Pakistan.
The Awami League got a landslide victory by winning an absolute majority of 167 seats (39.2% votes, 13 million votes) in the National Assembly of Combined Pakistan and 298 of the 310 seats in the Provincial Assembly of East Pakistan. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won only 81 seats (18.6%, 6 million votes) in the National Assembly, but was the winning party in Punjab and Sindh.
The Assembly was initially not inaugurated as President Yahya Khan and the PPP did not want a party from East Pakistan in the government.
Several learned, far-sighted and brave people from West Pakistan supported handing over power to the Awami league, such as the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and rights activist Malik Ghulam Jilani, father of Asma Jahangir, G. M. Syed, the founder of Sindhi nationalist party, Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM), etc., but their pleading, expositions, etc., were dismissed for trash.
On 7 March 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman demanded:
1) The immediate lifting of the martial law;
2) Immediate withdrawal of all military personnel to their barracks;
3) An inquiry into the loss of life; and
4) Immediate transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people before the assembly meeting on 25 March.
25 March, 1971: The genocide, called Operation Searchlight, began with Pakistan army’s crackdown on the people of East Pakistan on the midnight of 25 March 1971. It pursued the systematic elimination of nationalist Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, religious minorities and armed personnel.
March 26, 1971: The call for the Liberation of Bangladesh was given by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
The Pakistan Army, backed by the Islamists, created radical religious militias—the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams—to assist it during raids on the local populace. Urdu-speaking Biharis in Bangladesh (an ethnic minority) were also in support of the Pakistani army. Members of the Pakistani military and its supporting militias engaged in mass murder, deportation, rape and genocide. Dhaka was the scene of numerous massacres, including Operation Searchlight and the Dhaka University massacre. Thousands of Bengali families were interned in West Pakistan, from where many escaped to Afghanistan.
An estimated 10 million Bengali refugees fled to India, while 30 million were internally displaced.
There was a war between India and Pakistan in 1971, and Bangladesh became free from the dominance of West Pakistan. However, the mess did not end there and then. It had ramifications.
Assam:
1978: Observers noticed the names of an estimated 45,000 Bengali illegal immigrants on the electoral rolls in Assam. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) demanded that the elections be postponed until the names of “foreign nationals” were deleted from the electoral rolls. The AASU subsequently launched an agitation to compel the government to identify and expel illegal immigrants.
1979-1985: In one of his speeches, Vajpayee was quoted as saying, “Foreigners have come here and the government does nothing. What if they had come into Punjab instead? People would have chopped them into pieces and thrown them away.” Atal Bihari Vajpayee was quoted by former CPI-M MP, Indrajit Gupta during a debate on trust vote moved by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May, 1996.
In the morning of 18 February 1983, a mass massacre was organized in Nellie. It claimed the lives of 2,191 people (more than 10,000 according to unofficial figures) from 14 villages.
Assam accord was signed on 15 August 1985 between the Government at Delhi and the Protesters in Assam.
1989:
An Account by an Eyewitness
BODO Movement was in operation.
At an Assamese village, Gudama, near Samdrup Jonkhar, Bhutan, 47 kilometers from Rangiya Railway Station, an old man came to the market with a fisherman’s basket to sell fish.
A young shopkeeper and his brother called him into their shop. He obliged them. I was taking tea in another shop just across the road. After a while, one of the two brothers screamed at the old fisherman, “Son of a pig!” The old man called public attention in a pathetic voice. “See O’ Gentlemen! He is abusing me.”
Nobody responded.
The shopkeeper went on threatening the old man and repeating, “Son of a pig!”, “Son of a pig!”…
The old man continued his pathetic call for public attention.
After a few minutes, one well-built, middle-aged man actually came to the old man’s rescue and began asking the two brothers about the happening. Within a few minutes of the argument, the two brothers began beating the mediator. In a flash, the violence flared up.
The whole market was closed within minutes.
Young and middle aged men came with sticks and iron rods to settle some unknown scores. Two groups were immediately formed and their mutual violent hitting of each other reached to its own frenzy.
I don’t know how the battle ended because the moment the violence began, the restaurant, where I had been taking my tea and waiting for a colleague to join me on my onward journey to Rangiya Railway Station, the young owner of that restaurant caught hold of my hand and led me to a secret place behind some racks in the rear portion of his restaurant.
I wondered why he had hid me thus. And being young, and despiser of this manifest timidity, and unable to understand any reason for hiding myself, I came out on the street just after a few minutes.
The young restaurant owner noticed me immediately. He instantly caught my hand again and took me back to the same hiding place. “Stay here till I come back!” he ordered me.
I stood dumb and dull there for quite some time.
After “normalcy” befell again on the cursed place, since I was unable to meet my colleague, and because the train, North East Express, which was to take me to New Delhi, had been missed by several hours, I returned to Samdrup Jonkher, Bhutan.
That year in December, I had again to travel through that BODO town. This time I was accompanied by my wife and my son, who was just a toddler those days. My wife was wearing some ornaments of gold. We boarded a bus to Rangiya. The other passengers in the bus presented such a ghastly look of extreme poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and temper that I felt horrified with the prospect ahead for me, my wife and our son. If they happen to cast a look at my wife and notice the golden ornaments, they might attack her. And in case they do, I would suggest her to open the ornaments and hand them over to the people that demand so, without any violence. However, I also knew it perfectly well that she would not accept my suggestion even if I would weep at her feet with all the misery of my prospective doom. I thought my last hour and last journey of life might be what I was in. I didn’t tell her to hide her ornaments because she would not do so in any case. My suggestion to her would be the foolish-most thing to do under the circumstances. She would start arguing with me in retaliation. And that would certainly draw all passengers’ attention to her. And her ornaments would be noticed within seconds, and the demon of violence and death summoned into action, and my feeble hope of survival vanish.
What was I to do?
The only thought that came to me was they might not kill our very good looking child. So I wrote the address of my home on a sheet of paper and kept it secure in my pocket.
That was the experience of an eyewitness.
….
You might laugh to your heart’s content at the “unrealistic” apprehension of the above writer—but I know his fear was not unfounded. Though the official data about the people gone missing since 1970 is not available, there are reports of missing people of all ages in Assam. While small boys and young girls are abducted for forced labor and sex-trafficking, adults are vulnerable to ethnic riots, burning of houses, murder and disappearances. I knew one junior engineer of CPWD from Delhi, who was posted in Assam. His wife’s brother had come all the way from Delhi and opened a pigsty in Kathmandu. The junior engineer visited Kathmandu in 1998. He was in his late thirties, and not robust by body. He came again next year along with his two daughters and wife. He beseeched his brother-in-law to help him to do something in Kathmandu or make him a partner in the pigs’ farm. The latter refused that because his farm was not profitable, and a junior engineer’s job was far more prestigious and secure. The junior engineer returned to Assam alone. His family returned to Delhi. And he disappeared from Assam while on duty; and CPWD did not get any clue as to how and where he disappeared. The devastated family didn’t get any salary or pension or PF or gratuity of the disappeared junior engineer.
This fact can be updated with the help of KPs. The particular family was living in the neighborhood of the family of the famous Kashmiri poet and educationist, Sarvanand Kaul, who had been given the title Premi by the father of modern Kashmiri poetry, Mehjoor. Sarvanand Kaul Premi and his son, Virendra Koul, were kidnapped and murdered in Kashmir on April 30, 1990. The survivors of the family migrated to Delhi. Some KPs from Hangalgund and Kokernag are sure to be in contact with that family. They can shed further light on whether the family of the disappeared junior engineer of CPWD in Assam received any dues, compensation, etc., or not.
….
Bangladeshis
I have personally seen a young girl and her mother from Bangladesh washing the clothes, sweeping the floors, and doing other menial work, for very little wages, in a family in Delhi.
They, the Bangladeshis in India, are very poor, illiterate, ignorant, helpless people, dwelling in slums… They are illegal immigrants.
So the “rich”, “affluent”, “civilized”, “educated”, etc., the natives of the land, i.e. the “lords” and the lower middle class people with the illusion of grandeur of being the masters of India, are all furious against them. The services that Bangladeshis did in the houses of Indians for very little wages counted for nothing.
I have also seen some KPs and others having often extra-marital relations with Muslim girls in Kashmir. I have seen them talking to their girl-friends for hours on the mobile phones…. However, I have also found these very “decent” men and “good” husbands of their own wives, and “pride” of their own daughters, and champions of Great Indian Culture… abhorring all people living in Kashmir, and presenting themselves in the form of unconditional and ardent Bakhts.
One wonders whether there will be any feeling in these “lovers” in case their respective Kashmiri girl friends are gang-raped, rendered very poor, starved to death or murdered by the police or CRPF or army personnel.
….
The Western Countries and Japan have been doing a lot of progress from year to year in the fields of science, technology, social sciences, education, applied sciences, industrial development, etc., and therefore they have been able to absorb and naturalize or try to naturalize millions of people from all over the world, including millions of Indians.
In contrast, North Indian States and Kashmir were forced to remain stagnant or regress or advance at a very slow pace. Their resources were exploited by the bossed in New Delhi and their corporate sponsors. For example, crude oil production across Assam amounted to almost 4.3 million metric tons at the end of the fiscal year 2018; it was 5 million metric tons in FY 2012. Assam also yields 60% of the tea production in India.
In 1950, per capita income in Assam was more than the Indian average. The plunder of Assam caused the economic growth rate to remain far lesser than the Indian average, and the per capita income in Assam has now been reduced to about 60% of the Indian average.
In short, the wealth of Assam has enriched heavily the outsiders and impoverished the Assamese. Tea exporters and merchants are rolling in wealth. Tea workers are reduced to mere skeletons.
Similarities of this phenomenon are everywhere in the world, especially in Baluchistan. Baluch people are emaciated, the looters of their wealth are hideously obese. We are talking about citizenship and citizens’ rights—particularly in context of the situation in Assam and Kashmir—and we are also closing in on the NRC and CAA.
Relevant here is the fact that before the invasion of Iraq—based upon the hideous lies for its justification—in 2004, there were huge demonstrations in the USA and other countries against the plan of war. The rulers and their media vilified the wise demonstrators, maligned them, called them idiots and anti-nationals, and so forth. The result thereof is obvious. Tens of thousands of unfortunate soldiers, in their prime of life, are now with amputated limbs for the rest of their lives. Tens of thousands of young sons of unfortunate parents were killed. Millions of Iraqi people suffered all the gruesome things like devastation of homes, destruction of infrastructure, loss of limbs, loss of health, death…; and the whole society was reduced to shambles, wherein brutes, criminals, rapists, murderers, etc., abound.
After becoming independent or after becoming a vassal of the Indian businessmen, Bangladesh was in tatters. Many of the wretched migrants to Assam couldn’t or didn’t return to their homes, which had already been destroyed. Bangladeshis in India might be currently around 5 million in number [Samir Guha Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute called the government estimates of illegal Bangladeshis “motivatedly exaggerated”]. Assuming that 10 million people had run away for their lives from East Pakistan in 1970–71, it is natural that 70% to 80% [average 75%] of them must have returned back to the young, “promising” Bangladesh. Assam was no heaven for them; and their own villages were not worse hell than Assam was for them. So, around 2.5 million of the most wretched of them might have remained back. And fifty to hundred thousand more might have escaped from Bangladesh to India every year for various reasons, just as many Indians have been escaping from India every year.
For example, if Jammu and Kashmir becomes a New Independent Country, many Kashmiris, Dogras and Ladakhis from all over the world will rush back to their homes, even if the conditions there might not be as comfortable as they are in others places. People desire to achieve fulfillment in life; they are ready to give up some of their comforts for such fulfillment; and they generally don’t miss any opportunity for doing so. All classes of people are subject to this phenomenon. And, nevertheless, some people that might or might not have migrated out will escape from the New Country every year. Both processes are natural and simultaneous—just as every day there are births as well as deaths in each country.
Bangladesh now is “well off” in comparison to 1970 or 1990 or 2010—it is self-sufficient and can easily accommodate all the three to five million Bangladeshis back into its territory—but the problem is manifold. Leaving cultural and social aspects of where they were born, raised up, educated, environmentally naturalized, etc., aside [a person who comes to New Delhi or Kolkata or Mumbai at the age of forty, and settles there, will always live like a foreigner there, because he can’t remember the names of all the places there; he can’t acclimatize with the social environment well enough], economic problem is a great issue. Most of them have no documents to prove that they are Bangladeshis. They have no property in Bangladesh. Wherever they have been living in India for the last fifty years or less, they have some property there. NRC robbed some of them in Assam (of the 1.9 million people disfigured and isolated by NRC, many are Indians, some of them are pure Assamese) of all the small things they had manages to collect through their fifty years’ hard toil and pathetic survival in India.
The gruesome mess created in Assam is all due to the muddleheaded robbers of Congress; and fueled by BJP/RSS. Indira Gandhi and the feudal lords of Bangladesh wasted 11 years till the Nellie massacre was carried out. The current self-sufficiency in Bangladesh doesn’t mean that farmers and workers are not in wretched conditions, many people are not starving, many people are not dying for want of medical facilities, masses are not ignorant, deceived, treated for cattle, and so forth. Self-sufficiency only means some people have become extraordinarily rich, trade is going on well, manufacture and agriculture is on the rails, etc.
In 1971, measures needed to be taken on war-footing in Assam and/or Bangladesh to industrialize Assam and/or Bangladesh, establish State Capitalism [obviously, private monsters didn’t have enough capital; had they had it, they would have done so] or make the local people partners of various enterprises, render Assam and entire North East and/or Bangladesh affluent by organizing agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, etc. In short by creating an economic revolution appropriate to the land, environment and people of these target areas.
Assam remained completely ignored. Its wealth was looted. Its budget misappropriated by the robbers in power from time to time.
When you leave any place backward, as you did in Assam and Kashmir, when you plunder the region as much as you can, the region loses its capacity and forbearance to accept and absorb any outsider into the land. Wherever there has been social progress, the land and the people gained potential to invite, accept and absorb the outsiders. There are thus 45 million foreign immigrants in the USA, i.e. around 14% of the population—and the USA is a nation of nations. In comparison, India, in its demonic vain-glory, proudly announces that it is so wretched that it doesn’t have the capacity to absorb even the equivalent of 1% of its population—a maximum of 13 million immigrants in total, including 5 million Nepalese, 5 million Bangladeshis and 3 million others—in its 1300 million population. India has not been able to assimilate even a hundred thousand Tibetan refugees in its vast society for the last sixty years. Tibetans are driven to remain aloof, a segregated community, confined to refugee areas, without citizenship rights—and socially outcast. Intermarriage, the mortar of cementing various sections of any region or country together, the fabric of social harmony, is extremely rare. Castes, creeds, colors, etc., remain dominant over social relations between people as the gruesome prospects ensuring absolute insecurity. This all is merely the mark of abysmal backwardness and incompetence, which is passed on for nationalism, patriotism, and glory of some “glorious” ancient culture.
Why do people [e.g. Assamese and Kashmiris] oppose others’ coming to live among them? The answer is simple. You are a poor man with a family; and you scratch out a miserable living with much difficulty. An unknown guest comes to join your family. He partakes of whatever food you have in your household. Your burden is increased. He is ready to share your work in the field and industry, but you have no industry and little land to do farming in.
And there is another threat too. A monster of a super-rich man also comes to the area. He appoints a few goons. He bribes the policeman and the administrator. They become his maid servants. He builds a mosque or a temple in the area, or he contributes a suitable sum of money for its construction. He purchases the political leaders for whatever their worth may be. He appoints brokers and goons to buy land, he purchases all useful land of the area. He forces you to sign the sale-deal of your hovel. You have lost your hovel also. You are landless and a servant to him now. You have to beg for some job in his farm or industry, but there is no vacancy. You have lost your little means of survival also.
If there are 20 million rapists and murders in India, how far is it justified to demand from all 1300 million people to prove that they are not rapists and murderers?
If there are 400 dummy cows among a herd of 15,00,000 cows, how far is it reasonable to slaughter all the 15,00,000 cows?
Apply it to NRC.
USA, Japan, S. Korea and all European countries have undocumented immigrants.
If any government puts the onus on all people to prove their citizenship, that government will be classified and judged as totally mad within hours of that announcement. And the next day, it will be in the dustbin of history.
The societies that are pathetically backward and stubbornly headless treat themselves for cattle and take pride in doing so.
The solution:
There are two aspects of the solution.
Long term solution lies in the march towards the ideal of global citizenship. Wherever a person wishes to live and serve, he/she should be entitled to go, work and settle there. However, this is not possible as yet and for a long time into the future—[this article was written before the pandemic of COVID 19 became global].
In the current circumstances, all you have to do for the short-term solution is, for example: identify those 10 to 20 million rapists and murderers. And that is not difficult at all. One rapist or murderer knows others of his own trade and they in turn know others. The chain is long. And everybody can be identified within six months to one year. You don’t need to put the onus on the 1300 million unfortunate citizens to prove that they don’t belong to these categories. They don’t need to be troubled, interrogated and bashed.
Ditto with the undocumented immigrants.
What you have done in Assam is not only extremely ridiculous but also disgustingly clumsy, addle-pated and slavish. And, of course, you look forward and enjoy the process of putting 1300 million people into wretchedness, and you desire to waste their time and send them to frenzy and horror by demanding from them to show you the documents of your choice when you yourself refuse to show even your own credentials of schools and colleges.
A good government would identify the dummy cows, and it would also identify the undocumented immigrants by scientific means adapted in the USA, otherwise it would get out from power or handover the country’s administration to the US bosses, who would do the job without slaughtering all the 1.5 million cows and without insulting and humiliating all the people in the country.
The tribal people don’t want anything from you. They just want to live in peace in their own lands. They never think of robbing you of your houses, resources, etc., which you do to them in their wakeful state. You genuinely and for sufficient reasons look like hideous brutes to them. In the annals of human intellect, you verily are so, though you swear by all your holy scriptures that you are not!
Your compulsions are murderous. You can’t let them live as they please. You must exploit their resources; you have no choice. Your monstrous bellies are ever-ravenous even after devouring elephants each day.
So, speaking from the masses’ point of view, tribal and backward people need not be massacred and their young daughters need not be raped before being gunned down for satisfying your bosses’ compulsions of robbing them of their lands and means of survival. If you consider the rape of any tribal parents’ daughter as a fine thing, your own daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter will receive a similar treatment by the same process of nature. There is a much decent way to establish harmony with the tribal people and launching a holistic program of mutual benefit with them. They need to be made partners in the development of state capitalism among them.
The undocumented immigrants are not any expenditure or any threat to any host society unless some people among you yourselves infatuate them to become so and use them for your own evil propagation. They are merely small human beings toiling hard for their mere survival and creating wealth for your present and future generations in the process. They just need to be distributed over various states so that no state feels them for any burden on their resources or space. They have swept your floors, washed your clothes and dishes, treated you—petit bourgeoisie elements—with utmost respect, and rated you for excellent human beings or even role models or even “angels”… What makes you disgrace yourselves and prove them grossly wrong in rating you for excellent human beings? What makes you become brutal to them in your orientation and thinking? They have no resources which you would love to steal from them. All they have in their possession are rags, poor utensils or potsherds, and immense potential to create social wealth by their labor power. Do you want to wear their rags? Are their potsherds of any utility to you? No. Is their labor power of use to you? Yes; and no. It has been of use; that is how they survived so far. They would have starved to death otherwise. It doesn’t seem of any use to you because there is tremendous unemployment though uncountable work is yet to be done in the world. You are unemployed and they are unemployed. Your plight is mutual. You need to understand and identify the whole ocean of healthy work yet to be done in the world, and the grave disease of unemployment which the capitalist system is ridden with. You need to understand that Ambani, Adani, and other capitalists are the cluster of tapeworms of India. They have rendered you unemployed, emaciated and mentally sick. And Modi, Amit, Rahul, Manmohan, Sonia, Shashi, regional monsters, etc., are merely their overfed and ostentatious butlers that trade in chicanery—the proof thereof is the systematic way in which the national assets (state capitalist enterprises) were send into loss through thoroughly corrupt and inefficient management, embezzlements, frauds, etc., and delivered into the hands of private individuals.
