A move to force citizens to produce documents as proof of citizenship is a “fruitless, worthless and irrelevant exercise”, which may suit a political party’s agenda but is not in national interests, author Kunal Basu said.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens are dividing society at a time when all citizens need to come together, Basu said on the sidelines of a programme at Calcutta Club, where his latest novel Sarojini’s Mother was launched on Saturday.
“Whatever be its (the CAA-NRC exercise) merits, its paybacks either in terms of confidence of the Indian citizens, amity between different groups of Indians and the impact it has on the economy are actually not significant,” said Basu, who teaches at Said Business School in Oxford.
“It may fit the agenda of a political party but it doesn’t fit the national agenda.”
Referring to the plot of Sarojini’s Mother, where the protagonist is torn between a housemaid and a well-heeled woman, both claiming to be her biological mother, Basu said it was time to understand the true meaning of belonging.
“Sarojini’s Mother is actually a novel about belonging. Like several characters of this novel, people may have difficulty establishing their biological identity, but citizens who have belonged to this country through love, sweat and tears, through sacrifice… what about them?” Basu asked.
“People who have lived for generations in this country have established belongingness through the affections, through their pains. So, we as a society need to determine what we are going to give more weight in our judgement of belongingness,” he said.
Basu echoed what several actors, a singer, a theatre and film director, a writer and an academic have earlier said in a short video — Aamra kagoj dekhabo na (We will not show our papers) — to voice their protest against the CAA and the NRC.
Among those who featured in the video were actors Sabyasachi Chakrabarty, Swastika Mukherjee, Konkona Sen Sharma and Dhritiman Chaterji, theatre and film director Suman Mukhopadhyay, writer-activist Manoranjan Byapari, singer Rupam Islam and the head of film studies at Jadavpur University, Madhuja Mukherjee.
“This is a fruitless, worthless and irrelevant exercise. It can create divisions but not bring citizens together, which is what we need to do in this divisive world,” said Basu, whose story The Japanese Wife has been made into a film by Aparna Sen. “We need to bring people together and not set them against each other.”
