📰 The many faces of Pakistani Punjab’s militancy
Anti-India groups have selectively interpreted history to gain legitimacy among residents in the area
•The U.S. Congress’s just-released ‘Country Reports on Terrorism’ for 2018 has mentioned that Pakistan failed to “significantly limit” Punjab-based militant outfits like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). Earlier, in September, speaking in Torkham, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had warned his countrymen against going to India to fight jihad, stating that such actions would amount to doing “injustice to Kashmiris”. Coming at the height of the war of words between the two countries, the statement was a rare admission by a Pakistani leader that infiltration from that side of the 740-km Line of Control, as well as the international border in Punjab, is a fact.
•Over the years, most of the Pakistani militants who crossed the border, and were caught by Indian security personnel, had one element in common — they were all from the Punjab province. Contemporary discussions on extremism originating from the province are mostly framed around the Pakistani military’s support to these extremist groups. However, there are many other variables rooted in the Pakistani Punjab’s society that also need to be understood.
The dominant province
•Punjab overshadows other provinces in Pakistan primarily due to its size, resources and representation in elite institutions. It can be broken into three broad sub-cultural units: the Punjabi-speaking eastern and central Punjab; the Pothwari-speaking northern Punjab that includes Rawalpindi and Islamabad; and the Saraiki-speaking southern Punjab.
•Eastern and central Punjab is linguistically akin to the Indian Punjab. The Kartarpur Corridor falls in this zone. Many of the residents there belong to families who had migrated from India during Partition. They are mostly settled in Lahore, Sialkot, Lyallpur (Faisalabad), Montgomery (Sahiwal) and Gujranwala. In his seminal book Pakistan: A Modern History, British historian Ian Talbot wrote, citing Pakistani academic Mohammad Waseem, that “the five million migrants [from the Indian side of the border] have both provided a major support for Islamist parties and shaped the Punjab province’s strong anti-India and pro-Kashmiri leanings.”
•In addition, a less-acknowledged fact in Partition studies is the massive outflow of Muslims from the plains of J&K, mostly the southern part i.e. Jammu, in 1947. The extent of that migration can be gauged from the changes in Census data. Jammu district’s Muslim population, which was 37% in 1941, came down to about 10% in 1961.
•According to the 1948 West Punjab Refugees Census, the number of Muslims who migrated from J&K, most of them from Jammu, was 2,02,600, the highest outside east Punjab. Muslims from Jammu plains mostly settled in areas around Sialkot and Lahore.
•These past events, along with the constant turbulence in J&K’s politics, are selectively interpreted by Punjab-based, Kashmir-centric terrorist outfits to gain legitimacy. In the last 30 years, LeT, claiming to be fighting on behalf of J&K, has mostly drawn recruits from the eastern and central areas of the Punjab. The Mumbai attacks terrorist Ajmal Kasab was from Okara district, located near the Indian border.
Seasonal water scarcity
•Another issue used by militants to gain support is that of seasonal water scarcity. The name ‘Punjab’ was derived from the Persian words panj (five) and ab (waters). The five rivers referred to here — Chenab, Jhelum, Beas, Sutlej and Ravi — flow through the Punjab’s territory. The Indus Waters Treaty stipulated that the waters of the three eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — would be made available for unrestricted use by India. The waters of the three western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — were allowed to flow for unrestricted use by Pakistan, except for some limited use by India such as for agricultural purposes and generation of hydroelectric power from run-of-the-river plants. Chenab and Jhelum, which enter Pakistan through J&K, are major sources of irrigation for Pakistan’s eastern agricultural fields.
•Whenever there is seasonal water scarcity, terrorist outfits such as LeT point fingers at India. The ‘jihad in Kashmir’ is presented as a necessity by organisations like the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) to save Punjab’s agriculture. In the past, Hafiz Saeed, LeT founder and alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, has repeatedly tried rallying support of locals alleging that ‘India is in the process of constructing several dams on Chenab, Jhelum and Indus rivers in a bid to completely stop the flow of water towards Pakistan’.
•Northern Punjab is ethnically closer to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and, prior to 1947, provided the main vehicular route to the Kashmir Valley from British India. Pakistan’s Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid, who J&K Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik once said provided property and assistance to an early batch of Kashmiri militants, is from this region.
•The third part of Pakistani Punjab, southern Punjab, has relatively less in common with the rest of the province. Outfits like JeM, which took responsibility for Pulwama attacks, originated in this part of the country. In 2003, nearly a year after the group was banned, it also made an unsuccessful bid to assassinate the then-President Pervez Musharraf, for which it recruited a resident of Rawalakot, PoK.
Political marginalisation
•A 2016 International Crisis Group paper, written exclusively on violent extremism in southern Punjab, had stated that among the reasons for support for militancy in the “rural and relatively poorly developed” part of the province were “political marginalisation, weak governance, economic neglect and glaring income inequity”.
•Another element, according to the paper, was the role played by economically poor Muslim migrants from India in the spread of a radical version of the Deobandi School of Islam. This, the paper said, was more pronounced in places like Jhang, “the birthplace of organised sectarian militancy in Pakistan”. The poverty of the Muslim migrants from India was “in marked contrast to the [prosperity of] large landowners in rural areas, who were mostly Shias and Barelvis and formed the political elite.” This could explain the growth of outfits like JeM, founded by Masood Azhar, born in south Punjab’s Bahawalpur, as Jaish claims adherence to the Deobandi School. Deobandi scholars in India have frequently criticised Pakistan-based groups for misappropriation of this school of Islam.
•There has been a long-standing demand for the creation of separate province of ‘south Punjab’ within the Saraiki belt. However, it remains to be seen whether greater decentralisation can be an antidote to extremism rooted in a supposed Deobandi interpretation of Islam.
•Hence, apart from dealing with the challenge posed by the deep state’s support for these outfits, we also need knowledge of the sociological and historical nuances pertaining to the Punjab province. Such an understanding is necessary to develop a holistic response to counter the extremist threat.
The rationale for a nationwide register of citizens, its feasibility, and, above all, its moral legitimacy, are questionable
•The appetite of the Indian state for counting its people is evidently insatiable. The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner has completed a 10-year project of data collection, at the household level, for the Census of 2021. The individual level data collection for the National Population Register is also to be uploaded next summer, alongside the Census. As of January 2019, nearly 123 crore Aadhaar cards had been issued. In Parliament, recently, yet another exercise in counting was proposed, for a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC). While its predecessors were counting “residents” rather than “citizens”, the objective of this latest initiative is to count citizens — specifically to sift and sort citizens from non-citizens, to include and exclude, and having done so to weed out “infiltrators” destined for detention camps and potential deportation.
Taint of a label
•The rationale for a nationwide NRC, its feasibility, and, above all, its moral legitimacy, are questionable. Under the Foreigners’ Act, 1946, the burden of proof rests on the individual charged with being a foreigner. Since the Citizenship Act provides no independent mechanism for identifying aliens — remember the Supreme Court struck down the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, or IMDT Act, in 2005 — the NRC effectively places an entire population under suspicion of alienage. With what justification can a state that does not have the ability to “detect” aliens, or even to secure its borders against illegal immigrants, set out to find aliens by elimination? This is tantamount not only to using an elephant to crush an ant, but of torturing the elephant to do it.
The cost of ‘authentication’
•Let us also consider the resources needed to conduct such an NRC before discussing the deep moral misgivings such a project must provoke. The Assam NRC is reported to have cost ₹1,600 crore with 50,000 officials deployed to enrol almost 3.3 crore applicants in an exercise that even its champions acknowledge to be deeply flawed, as it ended up excluding 19 lakh people. On this basis, and taking as an indicative number the Indian electorate of 87.9 crore, a nationwide NRC would require an outlay of ₹4.26 lakh crore, which is more than double the presumptive loss in the 2G scam, and four times the budgetary outlay for education this year.
•The work of “authenticating” 87.9 crore people would entail the deployment of 1.33 crore officials. In 2011-12 (the most recent official data available), the total number of government employees in India was 2.9 crore. If, like the Census, this exercise is to be managed exclusively by the Central government, the additional personnel needed would make this a truly novel employment generation programme. One way or another, the entire population of India and more than half its government officials will be involved, for at least the next 10 years, in counting and being counted — by all reckonings, an exceptionally productive contribution to the nation’s Gross National Happiness. The remainder can be involved in building the new detention centres that will be needed to incarcerate the unhappily excluded.
•While the limitations of administrative capacity in India are a public secret, this is a nightmarish prospect for poor and unlettered citizens whose ancestors have known no other land but this, but who are unable to produce acceptable documentation. Few lessons have evidently been learned from the Assam experience that yielded unanticipated outcomes, especially unwelcome to those who were most enthusiastic about it. We would be silly to shut our eyes to the practices of “paper citizenship” acquired through what Kamal Sadiq has called “networks of kinship” and “networks of profit”.. As in Assam, such an enrolment drive could actually put undocumented nationals at risk of losing their citizenship in a futile search for non-national migrants who are invariably better documented. The fear of not having papers has already led to many suicides; we should brace ourselves for many more.
•Among the many uncertainties that persist is that about the cut-off date. March 1971 has little relevance beyond Assam. The speculation about a July 1948 date for the rest of India is implausible in light of constitutional provisions, post-Partition jurisprudence, and the enactment of the Citizenship Act in 1955. Second, will enrolment in the NRC be compulsory or voluntary (as in Assam), and what might the consequences of not seeking registration be? Finally, there is the federal imperative of seeking the consent of State governments. Already, many States in northeast India are erupting in protest. It is sobering to recall that political considerations alone have prevented the implementation, for over two decades, of the Supreme Court ruling awarding citizenship to Chakma and Hajong tribals in Arunachal Pradesh.
•If the NRC carves out paths to statelessness for groups that are disfavoured, the Citizenship Amendment Bill creates paths to citizenship for preferred groups. The implicit assumption in the NRC is that the infiltrators are Bangladeshis (read Muslims) who must be disenfranchised and stripped of any markers of citizenship that they may have illegitimately acquired. The explicit promise of citizenship in the CAB is to migrants belonging to specified religious groups — all except Muslims — who will be eligible for fast-track citizenship because they are persecuted minorities in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The Bill does not specify what, if any, evidence would be required for validating claims of religious persecution. Nor does it offer similar respite to the victims of sectarian religious persecution in neighbouring countries, such as the Ahmadiyas or the Rohingyas.
Weak assurances
•It has been unequivocally asserted in Parliament that the NRC and the CAB are unrelated. Such assurances are however unlikely to assuage the anxieties of Muslim citizens given the larger ecosystem for minorities in India. Vigilante violence against minorities and legal impunity for its perpetrators, the triple talaq legislation and the reading down of Article 370, are suggestive of a state-society consensus on the status of minorities as second-class citizens in the New India.
•The cumulative import of these developments is the entrenchment of a conception of citizenship inconsistent with that adopted at Independence. At the end of a prolonged debate on citizenship, the Constituent Assembly settled on the principle of jus soli or birth-based citizenship as being “enlightened, modern, civilized” as opposed to the “racial citizenship” implied by the rival descent-based principle of jus sanguinis. A shift from soil to blood as the basis of citizenship began to occur from 1985 onwards. In 2004, an exception to birth-based citizenship was created for individuals born in India but having one parent who was an illegal migrant (impliedly Bangladeshi Muslim) at the time of their birth. The CAB and the NRC will only consolidate this shift to a jus sanguinis citizenship regime.
•Constitutionally, India is a political community whose citizens avow the idea of the nation as a civic entity, transcending ethnic differences. The NRC-CAB combination signals a transformative shift from a civic-national conception to an ethno-national conception of India, as a political community in which identity determines gradations of citizenship.
•In the final analysis, the minutiae of implementation —from cut-off dates to resource constraints — are only cautionary arguments against this potential misadventure. The compelling argument against it lies in its adverse repercussions for the delicate but fraying plural social fabric of this nation; for the civilisational qualities of humaneness and hospitality that have marked our history; and, above all, for the equality of citizenship, based on birth and without regard to creed, that our Constitution guarantees.
📰 Reserve Bank flags rising bad assets from Mudra loans
Unsustainable credit growth in sector could raise risk in the system: M.K. Jain
•The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has expressed concern over rising bad loans from Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY), a scheme announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2015, which offers faster credit, with ticket sizes starting from ₹50,000 and going up to ₹10 lakh, to small businesses.
•“While such a massive push would have lifted many beneficiaries out of poverty, there has been some concerns at the growing level of non-performing assets among these borrowers,” RBI Deputy Governor M.K. Jain said at an event organised by the Small Industries Development Bank of India.
•With stress in such loans increasing, the central bank is set to ask bankers to monitor such loans closely as unsustainable credit growth in the sector could risk the system.
•Mr. Jain also highlighted the systemic and concentration risks that could emerge in the microfinance sector in India. “Systemic risk may arise from unsustainable credit growth, increased inter-connectedness, pro-cyclical and financial risks manifested by lower profitability,” he said.
•Observing that GST had hit the informal economy significantly, Mr. Jain said, “as a result of the improved digital footprint, MSMEs have become attractive clients for banks, NBFCs and MFIs, thereby reducing their dependence on informal source of funds.” The cost of credit for MSMEs will also come down meaningfully as lending will shift from collateral-based lending to cash flow based lending, he said.
•The government had in July informed Parliament that total NPA in the Mudra scheme of over ₹3.21 lakh crore has jumped to 2.68% in FY19 from 2.52% in FY18. Since the inception of the scheme, over 19 crore loans have been extended under the scheme up to June 2019, it had said. Of the total, 3.63 crore accounts are in default as of March 2019.
•However, according to an RTI reply, the bad loans in the scheme soared a whopping 126% in FY19, jumping by ₹9,204.14 crore to ₹16,481.45 crore in FY19 over the previous year.
