India may be proud of its agile politicians. In the midst of huge popular agitation, the prime minister suddenly declared that there has been no discussion on the countrywide implementation of the National Register of Citizens. This meant that the massive protests against the NRC and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 — enacted as a preliminary move to the NRC according to the Centre — have no point. That the people out on the streets facing hardship, police beatings and death either imagined things or are fools misled by the Opposition. Almost simultaneously, there was the cabinet permission given to the initiation of the National Population Register. And as quickly, people heard the Union home minister, Amit Shah, declaring artlessly that the NPR has nothing to do with the NRC, since they belong to different laws. But the Citizenship Rules, 2003, the law that introduces the NPR, states, step by step, how the NPR is the crucial first step to the NRC, a point that has been made, reportedly, at least nine times by different members of the Narendra Modi government ever since it came to power.

Funnily enough, the information and broadcasting minister, Prakash Javadekar, assured the public that no documents will be needed for the NPR, because the government trusts the people. That might be a slip. For trust is now the crucial word: do the people, or the thousands of them out on the streets, trust the government? For this government has been treating a law-abiding population like potential criminals for long enough; its new-found trust in the people is hardly relevant. Instead, the tallest leaders, or those with the broadest — metaphorically speaking — chests, seem to be turning somersaults in their statements in order to ensure that the people trust their totally contradictory statements. Or is this a way to bedazzle the poor and the foolish and slide in NPRs, CAAs and NRCs as they try to grasp the rapidly changing realities? Referring to the United Progressive Alliance as the originator of the NPR is another equivocation: the Citizenship Rules were formulated during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime. The UPA did carry out the NPR exercise but related it to the census that followed. Why call upon the UPA for legitimization? What is amazing, however, is the amount of money apparently always available for such exercises while the economy totters and people are instructed to do without onions. Whose money is it, anyway?