After the fall of Kabul, it seems like poor Afghan people have nowhere to go. All their borders are sealed and heavily guarded by Pakistan and the Taliban. Kabul airport is the only place in the country that has a semblance of order in a chaotic environment. Just imagine the situation inside Afghanistan hinterlands, if we have to call the apocalyptic scenes of people falling from Airplane wings as a sign of order. Sleepy Joe Biden has finally announced that ‘Nation-building was never a US Goal in Afghanistan. With Amnesty international only playing condemnation games Afghan people see a ray of hope in the humanitarian record of India.
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With India taking up significant efforts towards repatriation of Indians stranded and evacuation of Afghan people, the next natural expectation from India will be granting citizenship to Afghan nationals being brought to India. But, Geopolitical games do not act like a sprint race, it acts more like a marathon where we have to regulate our pace at different specific intervals. Providing Afghani nationals citizenship status will turn out to be a culturally, economically, demographically and even politically devastating step for India.
India’s GDP contracted by 7.3% owing to China, released COVID-19 induced lockdown. Though it has shown some signs of improvement, the positive economic growth has to be channelized towards re resurrecting the economy of the country, rather than taking the extra economic burden of establishing an alien population inside the country. India has a reserve surplus food grains of 1 year for 1.35 billion people, it can provide refuge to Afghani nationals and take care of their calorie demands. But India’s resource capacity need not translate into Afghan nationals being perpetually dependent on India.
With more than 1.4 billion people stranded in 3,287,263 Km and diversity as huge as it can get anywhere around the world, Afghans will create more problems for India. The thrust on Islamic culture by refugees does not fit in India’s democracy. India has been planning to adopt a two children policy for quite some time now, this is bound to create ruckus among them. The idea of converting to Hinduism, Sikhism and getting citizenship through the CAA route is not sustainable as conversion will be for the sake of citizenship and not because someone believes in the religion.
The United States did help the Afghans with $ 83 billion, it did not yield any result in 20 years. Indian help won’t do anything to them. India should refuse to give citizenship to Afghan nationals, it should only provide them with shelter, provide them food etc. under its capacity as it did to East Pakistanis for a brief period. We should make them able to apply for refugee status to other European nations as well as Islamic countries like UAE, SAUDI ARABIA and other OIC countries and raise voices for them on as many international forums as possible. Other than citizenship status, there are thousands of other ways to help the people of Afghanistan.
Giving them citizenship will be akin to bringing home a beggar to an already crunched household of yours, you never know when that beggar will re-prioritize his other needs and start to occupy your house, calling it his own. With 4,046 applications of Hindus still pending before the Government, we should allow Islamic culture based Afghan nationals to be homogenized as citizens inside Islamic nations. The overemphasis on liberal emigration led to a decline in the white population in the United States. Certainly, we do not want our Hindus, Sikhs and other brethren to become a numerical minority in a country established on the bloodlines of their forefathers.