On citizenship for the Chakma/Hajong people

(Mains GS 2 : Government Policies and Interventions for Development in various sectors and Issues arising out of their Design and Implementation.)

Context:

• Recently, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has directed the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Arunachal Pradesh government to submit an action taken report against the racial profiling and relocation of people belonging to the Chakma and Hajong communities.

Needs recognition:

• The Buddhist Chakmas and Hindu Hajongs were settled in Arunachal Pradesh in the 1960s after they lost land to the construction of the Kaptai dam on the Karnaphuli river in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in erstwhile East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh).
• The Supreme Court had in January 1996 declared the Chakmas and Hajongs as citizens and directed the Centre and the State government to process the citizenship applications of the people.
•  In 2015, the Supreme Court directed the State to grant them citizenship, but this had not yet been implemented.
• Of some 65,000 people belonging to these two communities today, 60,500 are citizens by birth while the citizenship applications of 4,000 migrants are yet to be processed.

Racial profiling:

• Most of the Chakma/Hajong community members were born in the State and have been living peacefully and integratedly in villages of the southern and south-eastern parts of the State.
• However, recently  the Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister announced that they would be relocated outside the State and that steps would be taken by a “census” of the communities.
• The so-called State-driven census would have amounted to a racial profiling of the two communities that have also been the subject of an antagonist and nativist campaign by organisations such as the All Arunachal Pradesh Students’ Union.

Ethnic fissures:

• It is difficult for any State government in the northeast to balance the interests of native tribal communities and those of legitimately settled refugees and their progeny.
• Special rights guaranteed in the Indian Constitution in these States in order to protect the tribal people, their habitat and their livelihoods, have more than occasionally been misinterpreted as favouring tribal nativism with overblown demographic fears fanning hatred for communities such as the Chakma/Hajong in Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram.
• Uprooting communities that fled their homelands under duress and have since been well settled in their adopted areas, contributing to the diversity of culture and the economy, would be a violation of their rights and repeating a historic wrong.

Conclusion:

• A dialogue needs to be in place between the State government, civil society and those of the Chakma/Hajong communities to address concerns and implementing the Court judgment of 2015.