Azadi - Arundhati Roy

“legacy documents”? Perhaps not even our prime minister, whose date of birth, college degree, and marital status
have all been the subject of national controversies.
We are being told that the India-wide NRC is an exercise to detect several million Bangladeshi
“infiltrators”—“termites,” as our home minister likes to call them. What does he imagine language like this will do
to India’s relationship with Bangladesh? Once again, phantom figures that run into the tens of millions are being
thrown around. There is no doubt that there are a great many undocumented workers from Bangladesh in India.
There is also no doubt that they make up one of the poorest, most marginalized populations in the country. Anybody
who claims to believe in the free market should know that they are only filling a vacant economic slot by doing
work that others will not do, for wages that nobody else will accept. They do an honest day’s work for an honest
day’s pay. They are not the ones destroying the country, stealing public money or bankrupting the banks. They’re
only a decoy, a Trojan horse for the RSS’s real objective, its historic mission.
The real purpose of an all-India NRC, coupled with the CAA, is to threaten, destabilize, and stigmatize the Indian
Muslim community, particularly the poorest among them. It is meant to create a tiered citizenship, in which one set
of citizens has no rights and lives at the mercy, or on the good will, of another—a modern caste system, which will
exist alongside the ancient one, in which Muslims are the new Dalits. Not notionally, but actually. Legally. In places
like West Bengal, where the BJP is on an aggressive takeover drive, suicides have already begun.
Here is M. S. Golwalkar, the supreme leader of the RSS in 1940, writing in his book We or Our Nationhood
Defined :
Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting
on to take on these despoilers. . . . The Race Spirit has been awakening. . . .
[I]n Hindustan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation. . . .
All others are either traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots. . . .
[T]he foreign races in Hindusthan . . . may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights. 46
He continues:
To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races—the Jews.
Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. . . . a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by. 47
How do you translate this in modern terms if not as the National Register of Citizens coupled with the
Citizenship Amendment Bill? This is the RSS’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German
citizens were only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the government of the Third
Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against
Christians, Dalits, communists—all enemies of the RSS.
The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centers that have already started springing up across India may not, at the
moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that India’s
Muslims truly deserve such treatment if they cannot produce legacy papers. Because only Hindus are considered
India’s real aboriginals, who don’t need those papers. Even the four-century-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right
legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?
This is the wickedness that the fifty thousand people in the Houston stadium were cheering. This is what the
president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the
Germans want to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to, and the Saudis want to fund.
Perhaps the whole process of the all-India NRC can be privatized, including the data bank with our iris scans.
The employment opportunities and accompanying profits might revive our dying economy. The detention centers
could be built by the Indian equivalents of Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben. It isn’t hard to guess what corporations
those will be. Even if we don’t get to the Zyklon B stage, there’s plenty of money to be made.
We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realize that unless they
make their move, the end is close.
If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these
times.
* The Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series on the Fate of the Earth, delivered at Cooper Union Great Hall, New York, November 19, 2019. First
published in The Nation , November 22, 2019.