ARE MUSLIMS ALONE WORRIED?

No. In Bengal, the fear of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) transcends faiths. Nabyendu Dasgupta, a 69-year-old Calcuttan who was born a year after his family reached Bengal from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1949, joined on his own a procession organised jointly by the Left and the Congress in Calcutta. “My family has been uprooted once. I can’t see that happen again,” said Dasgupta who lives in a colony. No family in the colony of 7,000 people has property papers, he said.

“We are all living in fear.”

ARE ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO BOTHERED?

Does not look like it. One affected passerby cannot be conclusive proof but the fact remains that at least one person paused and aired his concern.

Stuck behind the large protest rally at Esplanade on Friday afternoon was a food app deliveryman on a bike but he was not complaining. “What they are doing is for a much bigger cause. A little inconvenience is OK,” said the young man from Topsia.

He was heading to Girish Park with a food consignment, in the same direction as some 15,000 others on foot protesting against the amended citizenship act and the NRC.

“There is no other option. People have to come out and protest to make the government hear,” the food deliveryman said.

“I’m sure the people I’m taking the food to will also understand that and not penalise me for the delay.”

“So many people are out on the road on their own… that’s how serious the problem is,” he said. “The community I belong to is living in fear,” he added.

His family has a business but because of a faltering economy the margins have shrunk. He delivers food part-time.

As the bike crawled, he kept looking at his phone to track how far away he still was from his destination.

As he moved, he kept talking. “There is hope,” he said.

“See how people from all sections, all communities have come out to protest. There are young students who are concerned about our lives, our well-being. That is so encouraging,” he said.

ARE THE YOUNG BLINDLY OPPOSING NRC?

Bhavya Narasimhamurthy (Picture sourced by K.M. Rakesh)

No. Not if you listen to Bhavya Narasimhamurthy of Bangalore, who has empowered herself with two factors that spook the Sangh: education and statistics.

First, she stood holding a placard all by herself to beat the Section 144 ban on assemblies, right at the spot where scores including historian

Ramachandra Guha had just been detained for protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens.

Five days later, Bhavya became one of the faces of the protests when she told a YouTube channel that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah should be locked up in a detention centre for a year to establish if such camps are liveable.

She also challenged Bangalore South MP Tejasvi Surya — the BJP’s “youth icon” — to debate.

“Let’s see who is more educated: me and my real education or you and your sycophancy.”

Bhavya asked Surya to apologise for his use of the communally loaded term “puncturewallah” to describe the protesters. “That’s not how a people’s representative should be talking. There’s something called empathy and humility that comes with education.”

She has also called out Kangana Ranaut, an avowed Modi fan, on the actress’s expertise on taxation.

Bhavya said a countrywide NRC would cost Rs 70,000 crore, which can be used to educate 10 crore underprivileged children for a year, because educating a child costs Rs 7,000 a year.

She is not afraid of declaring her political affiliation either although she has joined the protests as a concerned citizen.

Bhavya told The Telegraph: “Even if I have to fight alone, I will do exactly that.”

Bhavya, an engineering graduate and Columbia University postgraduate who has worked with UN Women and Unesco, said she couldn’t sit quiet when the police detained protesters in front of Town Hall in Bangalore on December 19 morning for defying Section 144.

So she fetched up before Town Hall by noon, placard in hand, giving sound bites to a television channel. A few other solo protesters too arrived, but they all made sure there was enough distance between any two of them to beat Section 144.

“I have been a member of the Congress since November 2018 but I joined the protests in my individual capacity, as a concerned citizen who does not want draconian laws to divide the country over religion,” Bhavya said.

On December 24 evening, she participated in a candlelight protest by about 800 people in front of the Gandhi statue at Maurya Circle. By then Section 144 had been lifted. A video of her comments there to a YouTube channel — where she takes on Modi, Shah, Surya and Ranaut — has been widely circulated.

In the video, she accuses Modi of lying “big time” and advises Modi and Shah to “sit together first, talk, decide what to tell us and then tell us”. “Write your dialogues properly and then tell us because you are confusing the country.”

She told this newspaper later: “The Prime Minister and Amit Shah have been making contradictory statements (on whether the government has plans for a countrywide NRC exercise) to confuse the people.”

In the video, Bhavya says: “Put Modiji, Amit Shah, all the BJP MPs and MLAs in a detention centre (which are being built or planned for those who fail the NRC test) for one year. After one year, let them come out and prove to us that they (the centres) are liveable.”

She tells the BJP leaders that once they come out after a year, they would find the country “so prosperous and peaceful that you’ll be surprised”.

In the video, she trashes Kangana’s contention that only “three to four per cent” of the people pay taxes and the “rest (who) are dependent on them” have no “right to burn buses”.

“First understand the tax system of India. We pay tax to buy tickets to watch your movies, Kangana. Even for these candles we pay taxes,” she says.

In the December 19 video of her comments to a TV channel, Bhavya says: “Amit Shah and Narendra Modi are normalising communalism, legalising communalism, naturalising communalism by using this (citizenship) amendment act.”

She told this newspaper: “(Late RSS leader) M.S. Golwalkar, in his book We or Our Nationhood Defined, actually appreciates what the Nazis did to the Jews. He said India should learn from them. The CAA is totally that.”

Bhavya had earned her engineering degree in Bangalore and a master’s in public administration at Columbia University, New York. She worked for UN Women at its New York headquarters, for the UN Population Fund on gender-based violence in Egypt and for Unicef in Nepal on a nutrition programme.

After returning to India, she helped the Congress work out its Nava Karnataka Vision 2025 policy document and was part of the party’s manifesto committee ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

Bhavya has come under troll attacks. Some have used her photograph with Congress MP Shashi Tharoor --- taken during one of his visits to Columbia University --- from her Facebook page to make innuendos.

“It shows their cheap mentality, because there were pictures (on her Facebook page) with Raghuram Rajan too when he came to Columbia University,” she told this newspaper.