Reinstatement And First Amendment To Lease: Fill & Download for Free

The question, as asked by Dan Capici, at the time of answering reads:“As a fellow gun owner, do you support background checks on private sales if you don't, why not?”I’ve posted this elsewhere, and I’ve written it enough times I almost need to start a Quorablog about it so I can simply link it.As a gun owner I have no problem with expanding the existing, agreed upon, legal guidelines as outlined in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act signed into law by President Clinton. However coming back to the table asking to change an agreed upon law will require some actual compromise.To that end, here we go:A background check will be required on all transfers of firearms except under very specific circumstances.Gun buy-back programsTransfers to the policeTransfers to immediate family members limited to (extracted from ORS 166.435):Spouse or domestic partnerparent or step-parentchild or stepchildsiblingsgrandparentgrandchildaunt or unclefirst cousinniece or nephesspouse or domestic partner of any of the above.A transfer is defined as (again, extracted from ORS 166.435, some emphasis added):A transfer is the delivery of a firearm from a transferor to a transferee, including, but not limited to, the sale, gift, loan or lease of the firearm. “Transfer” does not include the temporary provision of a firearm to a transferee if the transferor has no reason to believe the transferee is prohibited from possessing a firearm or intends to use the firearm in the commission of a crime AND THE PROVISION OCCURS:At a shooting range, shooting gallery, or other area designed for the purpose of target shooting, for use during target practice, a firearms safety or training course or class or a similar lawful activity.for the purpose of hunting, trapping or target shooting, during the time in which the transferee is engaged in activities related to hunting, trapping or target shooting;under circumstances in which the transferee and the firearm are in the presence of the transferorto a transferee who is in the business of repairing firearms, for the time during which the firearm is being repairedto a transferee who is in the business of making or repairing custom accessories for firearms, for the time during which the accessories are being made or repaired; orfor the purpose of preventing imminent death or serious physical injury, and the provision lasts only as long as is necessary to prevent the death or serious injury.Failure to perform a background check will be prima facie evidence of criminal intent. To that end, failure to perform a background check will result in penalties that include:First offense: Class A misdemeanor Class A MisdemeanorsSecond offense: Class B felony What Is a Class B Felony?There shall be NO COST to the private citizen to conduct the background check.The background check can be completed either using the Federal NICS or, where available, a state alternative program. The background check must be performed by telephone.For each background check a unique Identification Code shall be issued to the transferor. This unique ID code is proof that the background check was completed. The only information allowed to be retained past three days of completion of the background check shall be:The date and time the background check was initiated.The results of the background check (ALLOW, DENY, WAIT)For WAIT results, there is a 72 hour window to update the results of the background check before a DEFAULT PROCEED is allowed. This information will be kept linked to the ID code for the transaction.For up to five business days the telephone number of the transferor will be maintained to allow the FBI and/or BATFE to follow up on DENY results from a background check.Prosecution: These laws are only effective if prosecutions occur, to that end:A record of the number of legitimate (not false positive) DENY results from all background checks shall be maintained. Prohibited persons who attempt to purchase a firearm shall be prosecuted under the laws on the books in the appropriate jurisdiction.A minimum prosecution (not conviction) rate of 75% is required.For states that fail to meet the 75% prosecution rate for two consecutive years the following penalties shall apply:A one week loss of ALL FEDERAL FUNDS FOR ALL PURPOSES (including federal student aid) for each percentage point below 75%. For example a state that has a prosecution rate of 65% will lose ALL federal funds for ten (10) weeks in the subsequent calendar year.Once the 75% prosecution rate is met a provisional reinstatement of federal funds shall be made. The state will be required to maintain 75% or greater prosecution rates for three years to lift the provisional status. Failure to achieve this will result in a doubling of the penalty.For the federal government, if the 75% prosecution rate is not met for two consecutive years or for four years out of ten the law will automatically sunset.A state prosecution for a violation will count toward the 75% prosecution rate.Bump-fire stocks, trigger cranks, and other after-market firearms accessories that work to mimic the action of NFA firearms shall be banned from future sale or transfer. The right to own said device dies with the present owner.Modifications to firearms, such as improved trigger assemblies, shall specifically be protected from prohibition.And there it is, what I view as an acceptable universal background check and bump-fire stock ban. and the TEETH TO MAKE IT MEAN SOMETHING. You see, the laws I copied from (with attribution) are the laws on the books here in Oregon. These are the laws as written by Progressives, and yet the state refuses to prosecute someone who very clearly, very blatantly, violated the law A MINIMUM OF TWO TIMES.Lake Oswego pastor won't be charged after AR-15 transfer allegationsIf these changes are so important to the protection of our children there should be NO PROBLEM in prosecuting those who break them. That means if you don’t prosecute those who break the laws then you didn’t really need the law in the first place so we will get rid of it.This is why I put the teeth into my provision.AND NOW, for the compromise portion of coming back to the table:Nationwide concealed carry reciprocity shall be enacted. The federal supremacy clause of the Fourteenth Amendment shall be invoked to force California, among others, to allow those with valid concealed carry licenses from their home state to carry concealed anywhere under the control of the United States (territories, protectorates).Current exclusions for airports, courts, and other highly protected locations shall be allowed to be maintained.Firearms legalities, for the purposes of carrying a concealed firearm, shall be determined by the home state of the citizen. For instance California has a very narrow list of allowable firearms, and limits on magazine capacity.A citizen from Montana where such restrictions do not exist shall legally be allowed to carry any Montana legal firearm in California.The Montana citizen may NOT sell the firearm to a private citizen while in the state of California.The Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 shall be revisited.The rights of otherwise law abiding citizens shall be protected. States, and in some cases cities, shall not be able to punish citizens who with no malicious intent break the laws of a given state. The City AND State of New York are infamous for this. To that end:Any state where a violation of the Firearms Owners Protection Act can be shown to have occurred shall lose federal funding for one week for each violation, not each case.The state is responsible for the actions of the cities within the borders of the state.The Hughes Amendment shall be repealed.The National Firearms Act of 1934 shall be amended to remove Short Barreled Rifles, Short Barreled Shotguns and Suppressors from the list of NFA items.You want to make changes, we can make changes.The cost is ACTUAL compromise, and law-abiding gun-owning citizens get some of our freaking cake back.Now, shall we discuss this like civilized adults and reach a compromise that BOTH sides are amenable to?Or do you just want more of my cake?

James Henry wants to know:“What would it take for you to support universal background checks for private gun sales?”A link to a Vox article is included for reference.For me to support performing background checks on all sales of all firearms the following would have to happen:As a gun owner I have no problem with expanding the existing, agreed upon, legal guidelines as outlined in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act signed into law by President Clinton. However coming back to the table asking to change an agreed upon law will require some actual compromise.To that end, here we go:A background check will be required on all transfers of firearms except under very specific circumstances.Gun buy-back programsTransfers to the policeTransfers to immediate family members limited to (extracted from ORS 166.435):Spouse or domestic partnerparent or step-parentchild or stepchildsiblingsgrandparentgrandchildaunt or unclefirst cousinniece or nephesspouse or domestic partner of any of the above.A transfer is defined as (again, extracted from ORS 166.435, some emphasis added):A transfer is the delivery of a firearm from a transferor to a transferee, including, but not limited to, the sale, gift, loan or lease of the firearm. “Transfer” does not include the temporary provision of a firearm to a transferee if the transferor has no reason to believe the transferee is prohibited from possessing a firearm or intends to use the firearm in the commission of a crime AND THE PROVISION OCCURS:At a shooting range, shooting gallery, or other area designed for the purpose of target shooting, for use during target practice, a firearms safety or training course or class or a similar lawful activity.for the purpose of hunting, trapping or target shooting, during the time in which the transferee is engaged in activities related to hunting, trapping or target shooting;under circumstances in which the transferee and the firearm are in the presence of the transferorto a transferee who is in the business of repairing firearms, for the time during which the firearm is being repairedto a transferee who is in the business of making or repairing custom accessories for firearms, for the time during which the accessories are being made or repaired; orfor the purpose of preventing imminent death or serious physical injury, and the provision lasts only as long as is necessary to prevent the death or serious injury.Failure to perform a background check will be prima facie evidence of criminal intent. To that end, failure to perform a background check will result in penalties that include:First offense: Class A misdemeanor Class A MisdemeanorsSecond offense: Class B felony What Is a Class B Felony?There shall be NO COST to either private citizen to conduct the background check.The background check can be completed either using the Federal NICS or, where available, a state alternative program. The background check must be performed by telephone.For each background check a unique Identification Code shall be issued to the transferor. This unique ID code is proof that the background check was completed. The only information allowed to be retained past three days of completion of the background check shall be:The date and time the background check was initiated.The results of the background check (ALLOW, DENY, WAIT)For WAIT results, there is a 72 hour window to update the results of the background check before a DEFAULT PROCEED is allowed. This information will be kept linked to the ID code for the transaction.For up to five business days the telephone number of the transferor will be maintained to allow the FBI and/or BATFE to follow up on DENY results from a background check.Prosecution: These laws are only effective if prosecutions occur, to that end:A record of the number of legitimate (not false positive) DENY results from all background checks shall be maintained. Prohibited persons who attempt to purchase a firearm shall be prosecuted under the laws on the books in the appropriate jurisdiction.A minimum prosecution (not conviction) rate of 75% is required.For states that fail to meet the 75% prosecution rate for two consecutive years the following penalties shall apply:A one week loss of ALL FEDERAL FUNDS FOR ALL PURPOSES (including federal student aid) for each percentage point below 75%. For example a state that has a prosecution rate of 65% will lose ALL federal funds for ten (10) weeks in the subsequent calendar year.Once the 75% prosecution rate is met a provisional reinstatement of federal funds shall be made. The state will be required to maintain 75% or greater prosecution rates for three years to lift the provisional status. Failure to achieve this will result in a doubling of the penalty.For the federal government, if the 75% prosecution rate is not met for two consecutive years or for four years out of ten the law will automatically sunset.A state prosecution for a violation will count toward the 75% prosecution rate.Any use of this system for purposes other than conducting a background check to determine eligibility to own a firearm shall result in a maximum penalty of25 years in prison and/ora $1,000,000 fineAnd there it is, what I view as an acceptable universal background check and bump-fire stock ban. and the TEETH TO MAKE IT MEAN SOMETHING. You see, the laws I copied from (with attribution) are the laws on the books here in Oregon. These are the laws as written by Progressives, and yet the state refuses to prosecute someone who very clearly, very blatantly, violated the law A MINIMUM OF TWO TIMES.Lake Oswego pastor won't be charged after AR-15 transfer allegationsIf these changes are so important to the protection of our children there should be NO PROBLEM in prosecuting those who break them. That means if you don’t prosecute those who break the laws then you didn’t really need the law in the first place so we will get rid of it.This is why I put the teeth into my provision.AND NOW, for the compromise portion of coming back to the table:Effective immediately upon the implementation of the private sales background check system concealed carry permits of any state, territory, or possession of the United States shall be legal in all states, territories and protectorates of the United States with the following provisions:Every applicable government agency has the legal obligation to provide updates to the NICS database at intervals not longer than bi-weekly.Failure to complete these updates shall result in the following penalties, with aggregation periods of 36 months for determining compliance:The head of the agency shall, for the first offense. have a civil fine of not less than $10,000The head of the agency, and the commissioner for the agency, shall for a second offense have a civil fine of not less than $50,000The head of the agency, and the commissioner for the agency, shall be charged with a Class A felony for a third offense.The concealed carry permit may be issued by ANY state.For constitutional carry states, a valid state drivers license is a valid carry permit.The issuing agency shall be liable to confiscate the permit, and all firearms personally owned by the now prohibited person, of anyone who through proper legal proceedings becomes a prohibited person.The legally owned firearms of other residents of the home shall be secured in such a way that the prohibited person shall not have access, and if so secured shall be protected from confiscation.Firearms legalities, for the purposes of carrying a concealed firearm, shall be determined by the LEAST RESTRICTIVE conditions. For instance California has a very narrow list of allowable firearms, and limits on magazine capacity.For instance, a citizen from Montana where such restrictions do not exist shall legally be allowed to carry any Montana legal firearm in California.The aforementioned Montana citizen may NOT sell the firearm to a private citizen while in the state of California.Conversely, a Californian can legally carry any Montana legal firearm within Montana.Current restricted areas such as court facilities and airports shall be able to prohibit carry.States that are found to be in violation of these citizen protections (New York, for instance) shall be fined $10,000,000 for the first violation,each subsequent violation will double the levied fine.These fines shall be deducted from the federal aid to the state, this includes tax breaks for the businesses that are headquartered in these states.The Hughes Amendment shall be repealed.The National Firearms Act of 1934 shall be amended to remove Short Barreled Rifles, Short Barreled Shotguns and Suppressors from the list of NFA items.The 1989 import ban shall IMMEDIATELY be removed from the books.You want to make changes, we can make changes.The cost is ACTUAL compromise.Are you ready to come to the table?

The Indian idea of citizenship – as embodied in the Constitution and the law – is in the throes of a profound and radical metamorphosis. The twin instruments of this transformation are the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act. If the former is carving out paths to statelessness for disfavored groups, the latter is creating paths to citizenship for preferred groups. While the first is, despite the looming threat of its extension across India, presently limited to the state of Assam, the second is designed to be pan-Indian in its application.Not only do the two need to be read alongside each other, both of these in turn need to be read in the larger context of the government’s policies towards minorities, whether in the forced amelioration of Muslim women by the criminalisation of the triple talaq or the clampdown, since early August, in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. They also need to be read in the context of the acceleration of violence against minorities over the past few years, especially by vigilante lynch mobs who have been thriving on the promise of legal impunity. An adequate understanding of both the NRC and the CAA depends on an appreciation of the ecosystem for minorities constituted by these twin phenomena, emanating from the state and society respectively.On the watch of the Supreme Court and under its unrelenting pressure for the completion of the NRC within a certain time-frame, Assam has served as a laboratory for a potentially dangerous experiment. Even though the results belied the expectations, the talk of sending those excluded from the Register to detention centers has given credence to the fear that thousands of people are vulnerable to being rendered stateless and right less. Existing detention centers in Assam are already populated, and new ones are being erected on an unprecedented scale.In Assam alone, there is the ongoing construction of a large detention camp, with a capacity of 3,000 detainees, with ten others planned to fit a thousand people each. A detention center in Nelamangala, near Bangalore, is being touted as a first in south India. Meanwhile, the Global Detention Project has cataloged 10 existing detention centers in India, most of them in use since 2005 and 2006.Implications of CAAThe implications of these developments can be interpreted in multiple ways. From a legal perspective, they imply a foundational shift in the conception of the Indian citizen embodied in the Constitution of India, followed by the Citizenship Act, 1955. This is, first, a move from soil to blood as the basis of citizenship, from a jus soli or birth-based principle of citizenship in the direction of a jus sanguinis or descent-based principle, and second, a shift from a religion-neutral law to a law that differentiates based on religious identity. From the perspective of India’s social fabric, they signal an ominous fraying and unraveling of what was a daring and moderately successful experiment in pluralism and diversity.From a political perspective, they point to a possibly tectonic shift from a civic-national to an ethnic-national conception of the political community and its terms of membership. From a moral perspective, they prompt us to confront the weakness of our commitment to human rights and to the moral and legal person-hood of all human beings. From an international perspective, they remind us of, on the one hand, our longstanding aversion to signing international treaties on refugees and the reduction of statelessness and, on the other, our easy engagement in doublespeak with a valued neighbor. I will elaborate on some of these aspects to show how they are collectively refashioning the fundamentals of our collective life.In a sense, we are once again rehearsing the debates on citizenship in the Constituent Assembly. The chapter on citizenship in the Constitution was necessitated by Partition and is limited to the determination of citizenship for those extraordinary times. The debate on what became Article 7 – relating to citizenship for the large numbers of Muslims who had fled India in the midst of the Partition violence but later returned – was fraught, the contention reflecting the communally charged atmosphere of Partition. Several members of the Assembly, who cast aspersions on the loyalty and intentionality of these returning migrants, called it the “obnoxious clause”.Though the markers of religious difference were not openly displayed, they are easily spotted in the consistent use, in the Assembly, of the words refugee and migrant for distinct categories of people – Hindus fleeing Pakistan described as refugees, the returning Muslims described as migrants – subtly encoding religious identity in a shared universe of meaning. The Assembly eventually adopted what it called the more “enlightened modern civilized” and democratic conception of citizenship, as opposed to “an idea of racial citizenship” and the Citizenship Act 1955 gave a statutory basis to the idea of jus soli or citizenship by birth.Over time, chiefly triggered by the political unrest in Assam, this conception has been moving slowly but surely in the direction of a jus sanguinis or descent-based conception of citizenship. Assam has a long and complex history of in-migration, mostly from Bengal, from the 19th century onwards. It witnessed substantial in-migration from 1947 onwards, peaking in 1971, and continuing steadily thereafter. It was no secret that many of the immigrants in recent decades had acquired forms of what Kamal Sadiq has called “documentary citizenship” through “networks of complicity” and “networks of profit”.In 1985, in the wake of the gruesome Nellie massacre of 1983, the Assamese students’ organisations that had led the agitation against the enfranchisement of migrants from Bangladesh entered into the Assam Accord with the Rajiv Gandhi government, leading to an amendment in the provisions relating to naturalization in the Citizenship Act. This amendment created categories of eligibility for citizenship based on the year in which a person had migrated to India. All those who came before 1966 were declared citizens, those who came between 1966-1971 were struck off the electoral rolls and asked to wait 10 years before applying for citizenship, and those who came after 1971 were simply deemed to be illegal immigrants. Though these provisions were a response to the genuine grievances of the Assamese, they already contained the seeds of the politicization and incipient communalisation of the issue of migrants.Religion as identifierMeanwhile, the gradual dilution of the principle of jus soli and the increasing recognition of elements of jus sanguinis – dependent on religious identity – was proceeding apace. Two amendments of 2004 – one to the Citizenship Act and the other to the Rules under the Act – show how religious identity was gaining ground as the basis of legal citizenship. Both introduced religion into the language of the law, the first implicitly and the second explicitly. The amendment to the Citizenship Act covertly introduced a religion-based exception to the principle of citizenship by birth. The amendment undercut the jus soli basis of citizenship, by stating that even if born on Indian soil, a person who had one parent who was an illegal migrant at the time of her or his birth, would not be eligible for citizenship by birth. Since most of the migrants from Bangladesh, against whose arrival there was so much political ferment in Assam, were Muslims, the term “illegal migrant” signaled this religious identity.The Citizenship Rules were simultaneously amended to exclude “minority Hindus with Pakistani citizenship” from the definition of illegal immigrants. This amendment, firstly, destigmatised Hindu migrants, most of whom had come into the border states of western India from Pakistan, by dropping the label of “illegal migrants” for them, and officially describing them henceforth as “minority Hindus with Pakistan citizenship.” Secondly, it openly introduced a religious category into what was until then a religion-neutral law.In the run-up to the Assembly elections in Assam in early 2016, the Bharatiya Janata Party had made an electoral promise to “free” the state from illegal Bangladeshi migrants by evicting and deporting them. This was a dog-whistle reference to a specific religion, as it simultaneously promised to give Indian citizenship to all Bangladeshi Hindu immigrants if it won the election. This promise will be fulfilled by the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, which not only makes explicit but also legitimizes the inflection of the law on citizenship with religious difference.The Act essentially provides for fast-track citizenship by naturalization for migrants from the neighboring countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who are religious minorities in those countries. It makes it possible for the preferred categories of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians to obtain Indian citizenship in six years instead of the 11 it usually takes. Muslims are conspicuous by their absence in this listing, ostensibly on the grounds that they are not minorities in these three countries and cannot, therefore, be seen as persecuted.The fact that Muslim sects like the Ahmadiyyas and Rohingyas are also persecuted in these countries does not make them eligible for similar benefits. By introducing a religion-based difference in the presently religion-neutral law on citizenship by naturalization, this amendment would in effect create two categories of potential citizens: those professing the Hindu and other “acceptable” faiths; and those professing Islam.The Assam exerciseThis was also the implicit objective of the just-concluded NRC in Assam. The first National Register of Citizens for Assam was compiled in 1951, but remained largely dormant until political considerations gave it a new lease of life. In 2005, a meeting between the Center, the Assam Government and the All Assam Students Union, chaired by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, resolved to take steps towards updating the NRC to fulfill the requirements of the Assam Accord.In 2009, a petition was filed in the Supreme Court by an NGO called Assam Public Works asking for the updating of the NRC to be started. The Court gave a direction to this effect, and the exercise began in 2015, with the objective of recording all those who have documentary proof of being Indian, and of them or their ancestors having been in India before midnight on March 24, 1971. In a society as historically undocumented as India, and in a region that is regularly visited by natural calamities like floods, there are many people who cannot produce documents to establish their ancestry. In fact, those who are native inhabitants for generations may be undocumented even as immigrants have acquired “paper citizenship”.The result of the NRC has demonstrated the very real possibility that undocumented nationals may be unfairly deprived of their citizenship status. At the end of its first round, four million people out of the 32.9 million who had applied, were excluded. Fresh claims for inclusion were filed by 3.6 million people and at the end of this process, in August 2019, 1.9 million remain unauthenticated.Champions of the NRC have been surprised and disappointed by this outcome, as large numbers of Hindus are unexpectedly among the excluded, and the percentage of exclusion was larger in areas inhabited by indigenous people, and lower in border areas where illegal migrants have settled. Those left out include people who have served in the Indian Army or the Border Security Force for decades, the nephew of former Indian president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, and even Syeda Anwara Taimur, the only woman chief minister Assam ever had.Ironically, a former anti-immigration activist and even a local BJP leader found themselves excluded. In some cases, children’s documents were found to be acceptable but not those of their fathers. Notwithstanding the unexpected outcome of the NRC, public pronouncements from the ruling party continue to threaten the nationwide implementation of the Register. It is of course another matter that the state capacity to ‘sort’ citizens in this manner is very doubtful.As the factual outcomes of the process contradicted the political expectations of the enthusiasts of this exercise, the political messaging has sought to assuage fears by affirming that no Hindus would be deported. They could anyhow, on the basis of their religious identity, be reinstated as citizens under the CAA. It is genuine but undocumented Indian nationals belonging to the Muslim faith who would be excluded with no recourse to the CAA, while documented and possibly illegal migrants who belong to other faiths would be included.The legal battleA legal challenge to the Citizenship Amendment Act could plausibly bring into question its constitutionality, specifically its contravention of Articles 14 and 15 of the chapter on Fundamental Rights. Article 14 guarantees that “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.” This is not a right that is dependent upon such a person being an Indian citizen, it is available even to foreigners who happen to be within the territory of India.As such, differential treatment to individuals on the basis of their religious faith would appear to be in contravention of the right to equality. Article 15 prohibits the state from discriminating “against any citizen on ground only of religion, race, caste…” and the introduction of religious identity as a criterion into a matter as fundamental as citizenship is certainly questionable. Placing people in detention centers is arguably also violative of Article 21 of the Constitution which guarantees the right to life and liberty.Experts have moreover questioned the legality of the NRC on the grounds that a provision under the Rules cannot contravene the provisions of the parent Act. Authorized by the Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Card Rules, 2003, the NRC uses the cut-off date of 1971 – based on the Assam Accord – rather than the date of 1987 which is the defining criterion of citizenship by birth according to the Citizenship Act.The NRC and the CAA are manifestly conjoined in their objectives. The first paves the way to statelessness and detention centers for many poor and vulnerable people, and most unjustly for those whose genuine nationality is repudiated only on the basis of their faith. The second offers a smooth path to citizenship for groups of migrants who are deemed acceptable only on grounds of their faith. In other words, faith is set to become the exclusive criterion for determining who is an Indian citizen and who is not, for inclusion as well as for exclusion.Together, the NRC and the CAA have the potential of transforming India into a majoritarian polity with gradations of citizenship rights that undermine the constitutional principle of universal equal citizenship, with privileges of inclusion being attached to some categories of citizens while others suffer the disabilities of exclusion.Though the Citizenship Amendment Act ostensibly relates only to migrants seeking the legal status of citizenship, this is not just about migrants. The threat, rhetorical or otherwise, of a nationwide NRC shows that the fig leaf of illegal immigration is being used to bring the citizenship of all Muslim citizens into question. Migrants – beginning with those in Assam – are fast becoming a pretext to fabricate and advance a much more ambitious and nationwide project of “othering”. The multiple identities that have historically been at play in Assam make it disingenuous to present the animosity towards migrants exclusively in terms of Hindu sentiments against Muslims.When it visited Assam in May 2018, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on what was then the Citizenship Amendment Bill was petitioned by hundreds of organisations agitating against the CAB, expressing not only the secular constitutionalist objection to introducing religion-based citizenship provisions, but also in many cases the fear of both Assamese-speakers as well as indigenous tribal communities becoming minorities in their own land. The attempt to extrapolate lessons for a national-level Hindu political consolidation from the Assam situation is based on a misrecognition of identities in that state, and on a flawed singularising of its plural identity-related anxieties.Not only does the CAA exclude Muslim migrants from the provisions for fast-track citizenship, Indian Muslims who are full citizens by birth, have also been experiencing the abrogation of their constitutionally guaranteed rights of equal citizenship. Their endemic under-representation in India’s public institutions and their abysmal education and employment indicators are well-known. The unprecedented increase in incidents of vigilante violence against them over the last few years, and the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of such violence, signifies a systematic political and ideological attempt to render them second-class citizens.Shades of nationalismThe politicization of religious identity, finding articulation in and through the law, is a worrying portent for the founding vision of Indian nationalism which was emphatically civic-national in form. The march from a jus soli to a jus sanguinis conception of citizenship is also simultaneously a march from civic-nationalism to ethno-religious nationalism, from a universalist and inclusive form of nationalism to an exclusionary form that renders difference as graded hierarchy. This is nothing less than a radical re-invention of the imagination of India that informed and inspired the freedom struggle and found embodiment in the Constitution.The context of the anti-immigrant discourse that underlies the NRC, and the selective acceptance of persons “treated as illegal migrants” that underpins the CAA is important. It entails a substantive disenfranchisement of the Muslim minority, a normalization and justification of violence – both discursive and physical – against it, and a reconstruction of the Indian nation in the form of a Hindu Rashtra in which this minority lives on sufferance and must be prepared for everyday discrimination, legal and social.In comparisons between the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric of populist politicians across the world, it is rarely acknowledged that the “other” in India is wholly, historically and organically Indian, and not a recent entrant or stranger as in Europe or the United States. It is the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Afghans and the Tibetan Buddhists who are relatively recent immigrants to India, but even before the CAA, India had no difficulty in assimilating them. In a society as plural and diverse as that encompassed by the territorial boundaries of the Indian nation, the quest to make the borders of religion and nation coincide is tantamount to opening up the scars of the Partition of 1947. This cannot be achieved without damaging the delicate balance in a society characterized by multiple heterogeneities of language, region, caste and even of religious sects.At the same time, it cannot be denied that India has never had a spectacular record of commitment to human rights, or even to the idea that all human beings are entitled to moral and legal person-hood. The conundrum before us recalls a contention, most starkly identified by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. The supposedly universal and inalienable rights of man, Arendt argued, could not be invoked or claimed in contexts of statelessness. In the inter-war years, there was no international body to which 10 million de facto stateless people could appeal for their human rights, because a human being who is not a member of some political community is without recourse to such rights.The loss of a polity is the loss of humanity, for only membership in a political community, ie citizenship, can give people what Arendt famously called the “right to have rights”. The deprivation of legality, of a juridical existence, is tantamount to the loss of moral person-hood. Rights are meant to be enjoyed within a community, and the calamity of the right less, said Arendt, is that since they do not belong to any community, no law exists for them, and nobody even wants to oppress them. This was why the Nazis first deprived Jews of their legal status of citizenship before conveying them to concentration camps.In Assam, following the NRC, 1,145 people have already been placed in six detention centers in Assam, living in sub-human conditions; 335 of these have spent three years in camps; 25 persons declared “foreigners” have already died in the detention camps; and an estimated 33 person have been driven to suicide by the fear of not possessing papers.Although the Supreme Court has passed orders for the improvement of the conditions in these centers, there is a genuine moral concern about the very idea of such detention centers, which is at odds with India’s constitutional values, and more generally with the idea of human rights. Stripping people of citizenship, even of the merely documentary kind, and rendering them stateless is a clear violation of the duty, placed on states by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to avoid taking actions that result in statelessness and the deprivation of citizenship.Bangladesh, meanwhile, has been persuaded at the highest inter-governmental level, that the political rhetoric of sending the “termites” and “infiltrators” back to Bangladesh is an internal matter, and that there will be no deportation. In fact, the impressive economic indicators of Bangladesh today give rise to the speculation that we could now be looking at less migration from Bangladesh to India than in the reverse direction. Already, with 1.1 million illegal Indian immigrants, Bangladesh is the fifth largest sender of remittances to India. Given the cross-border movement of people in both directions, the two countries could even consider devising a mutually acceptable arrangement based on guest-worker visas.In the meantime, as the NRC converts legitimate citizens into illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants into stateless people, both destined for the camp; as the CAA selectively legalizes illegal migrants; and as minorities are rendered second-class citizens by the insidious use of the law, India stands on the edge of a dangerous precipice where not only its constitutional values but also its moral compass are at grave risk.Source: https://scroll.in/article/947458/the-caa-and-nrc-together-will-reopen-wounds-of-partition-and-turn-india-into-a-majoritarian-state