Shri Provash Ghosh, General Secretary, SUCI(C), issued the following statement today:
Instead of showing any concern and taking any effective step in right earnest to solve the pressing problems of rising unemployment, job loss, skyrocketing price line, peasants’ suicide etc. which are wreaking havoc in people’s life, the BJP-led central government has brought down another severe attack on the toiling countrymen in the form of so called NRC. It first implemented it in Assam against which our Party was the first to launch protest and develop resistance movement. Now the poisonous effect of such a sinister move is gradually becoming evident. 19 lakh odd people have been declared as ‘Foreigners’ in Assam as per NRC. Many of them have become mental patients out of panic. As per official report, 72 of them have already committed suicide. In reality, the figure is much higher. Efforts are on to put those so identified as “foreigners’ in detention centres built on the line of ant-Semitic concentration camps by Hitler. Now the BJP government is intending to undertake similar exercise in other states including West Bengal. In West Bengal, a fear has already gripped the people and many have already committed suicide.
As per the declaration of the BJP government, 130 crore countrymen are now to prove themselves their genuineness as Indian citizens. Why are the documents of citizenship asked from the impoverished misery-stricken landless people, the economically backward scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities, the illiterate millions and the religious minorities who have been residing in this country for decades? This has nothing to do with the interest of the people and the country. The interest is of the ruling capitalist class and the parties subservient to it. The fundamental principle of democracy is that those who are residents of a country are its citizens. The motive behind this move to ask for proof of citizenship is to pit one section of the people against another based on religious-casteist-communal divide, evict a good number of people from their home and hearth, snatch away their means of livelihood and drive a wedge between the masses as ‘citizens’ and ‘foreigners’. The ancestors of those who came here as refugees after partition were all Indian citizens. There is a national obligation to them. To disregard that obligation and designate bona fide Indians as ‘foreigners’ also constitute the hideous underbelly of the NRC conspiracy. Besides, it is well neigh impossible for the poor refugees, slum-dwellers, footpath-dwellers, flood victims and those who migrate from one province to another just for eking out a bare living, to possess and produce the kind of documents asked for proving citizenship.
We know that the ruling oppressive bourgeoisie and its pliant ruling parties always weave ploys to disrupt the solidarity among the toiling oppressed masses so that the latter cannot build up united movement against oppression and repression. To buttress that vile objective, the ruling dispensation does not hesitate to use the differences centred on religion, caste, ethnicity and language. NRC is such a noxious ploy. We demand immediate annulment of this atrocious ruse of NRC.
We call upon all sections of toiling people irrespective of caste-creed-religion-region-language-ethnicity to come forward and join the all-out resistance movement against this nefarious design.
