The government has stated in Parliament that it hasn’t taken any decision yet on preparing a National Register of Indian Citizens, but this may not be enough to bridge the political trust deficit. A shelving of the nationwide NRC project, or at least declaring a five-year moratorium pending the generation of greater consensus around it, would have worked better. Given the radical nature of the exercise – in effect, requiring all Indian citizens to prove their citizenship all over again, to the satisfaction of petty bureaucracy – the extent of mistrust it has generated was to be expected. That mistrust is only reinforced by the Assam chapter of NRC being acknowledged to be a failure by all sides including BJP.
Some states where opposition parties are in office are now unwilling to proceed with the National Population Register updation, and many others betray uneasiness over the exercise. This is a pity as NPR, which could have been used to strengthen welfare measures, is now falling victim to the CAA-NRC controversy. Unlike UPA which did not pursue NRC after the first NPR exercise in 2010, the NDA government has become a victim of BJP’s powerful hyper-nationalist messaging that jumped the gun by promising a nationwide NRC to follow the controversial CAA it legislated. The Citizenship Rules, 2003, envisage NPR as the staging point for a local and national register of citizens. So it was but natural for critics to link NPR, for which funds were sanctioned in December 2019, to the nationwide NRC that top BJP leaders were promising for several months.
It would be useful here to fall back on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s original call for ‘minimum government, maximum governance’, and refocus on the economy that is in dire need of attention. With NRC out of the way, the government will be in a position to recreate optimism around India’s economic prospects.
