In the discourse around the lethal combine of Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register, one cannot but overlook the fact that Goa’s pre-existing citizenship issues are crying for attention and are in fact the foundation on which the CAA-NRC-NPR has the potential to ride roughshod over the people of Goa. Are these issues specific to Goa, with no similarity to the citizenship issues in other parts of India? Some are and some aren’t.
Which bring us both to the issue of the federal structure of the Constitution as also sectoral concerns that remain unaddressed. Many Goans have demanded special status for the State in the past, a demand that has not found adequate space for discussion in Parliament and has simply been dismissed as something that is not possible under the law, without even caring to look at Goa’s specific history that would require recognition of certain claims of ‘specialness’. Such an examination would also bring forth the several strands of thought on what kind of special status has been and can be envisioned for Goa.
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As this concern has not been spoken to, this demand for special status, coupled with a feeling of being swamped, has now been channelised into a divisive Goans v/s non-Goans agenda. That too in a situation where the marginalised Goan, the marginalised non-Goan in Goa as well as the Goan migrating outside on a Portuguese passport in search of a job in the European Union, should actually unite since they are all potentially facing the axe of CAA-NPR-NRC. And in turn where those in Goa and in the rest of the country, who are challenging the discrimination on various axis, should be finding synergies.
Goans are marginalised within Goa and by other Goans on many counts too. The ever-present caste system that mutates and operates under different shades where people do not have land documents should they be asked for the same, even when they and their ancestors have been living on the land and engaging with the land for ages. The discrimination that operates against people on the basis of caste or tribal status, where lack of access to education now and in the past and non implementation of reservations has been a vicious circle that resulted in discrepancies in their names and consequently their inability to avail of scholarships supposed to available to these persons. The discrimination on the basis of so-called mother-tongue or language or variants of language as happens with Nagri and Romi Konkani, where the Sanskritised Nagri variant of Konkani has been encouraged effectively pushing the spoken Konkani including the Romi variant under the carpet. The discrimination and violence that operates on the basis of religion, where riots have resulted in people losing their hard earned assets and the offenders going unpunished due to State complicity at the stage of investigations itself. What happens about the documents of people such as these?
What happens with regard to the documentation where the names, for instance, of women who were driven out of their matrimonial homes were conveniently deleted from their ration cards, and women have a problem securing fresh ration cards without providing a deletion certificate? What happens with regard to the discrimination against a working class migrant, who is in fact at the receiving end, for instance, of builders, resulting in these workers having to live in shanties? All this discrimination and differences cannot just be swept under the carpet either by the pro-CAA or the anti CAA movement/s. They have to be addressed.
At another level, because of historic disadvantage, there is also a certain imperialism that operates from the Indian state on Goa and other states that are not part of the Hindi heartland, and which have different contracts with the Indian union, and for that matter even in the Hindi heartland against communities that are not considered Hindi or Hindu enough or that do not profess or endorse a politics of development that is different from the ruling dispensation or that resist the politics of the ruling dispensation?
The concern about this imperialism is also something that needs to be spoken to. If we brush it under the carpet of One Nation, One Law agenda, which is currently the agenda of the ruling dispensation, we will unwittingly be subscribing to the CAA agenda which is a continuum of the agenda of effective abrogation of Article 370, to post Article 370 scenario, where ever so many Kashmiris have been conveniently ignored and their voices silenced through arrest of leaders, internet shutdowns, the agenda of an ‘Uniform Civil Code’ which has now not come to connote any rights but simply a shorthand for flattening the identities of people and a denial of the diversity that India is, and, for that matter, even the diversity that Goa is.
As mentioned earlier, the citizenship issues are not new and have not been born simply of the CAA, but there was at least some willingness to listen, even if only a pretence. Currently with the present ruling dispensation, it is about ‘we shall go ahead, come what may’ or ‘you are with us or you are the enemy. You cannot dissent’. We live in times when there is not even any element of dialogue with those who have a different point of view, that is, opponents of the CAA-NPR-NRC, varied as they may also be. The calls for dialogue are empty calls. The phrase ‘prevention of law and order problem’ has even been used at the behest of those very people who are threatening to create a law and order problem for those democratically and peacefully asserting their citizenship rights including right to freedom of speech and expression and of assembly, as people in Mapusa had occasion to experience.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)
