Who Certifies an Indian?

At a press meet held at Guwahati on Tuesday, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee made it clear that the Congress Lok Sabha candidate from Tezpur, Mani Kumar Subba, was an Indian citizen and that he was not a criminal of any kind. He added that allegations about Subba’s Indian citizenship and his criminal past were raised before every Lok Sabha election. The Foreign Minister had two rather simplistic arguments to support his claims. He said that one could not contest Indian elections if one was not an Indian citizen and if anyone had committed a crime and been imprisoned for two years or more, he/she could not contest elections. Mukherjee’s comments raise a few pertinent questions. Since when did the External Affairs Minister acquire the jurisdiction to determine the citizenship of someone about whose citizenship even the Supreme Court has raised valid questions to the CBI? How does he know that Subba has no criminal record considering that over 100 MPs of the Lok Sabha have managed to become MPs despite having criminal records? Is he not putting the cart before the horse by saying that Subba must be an Indian because he has been able to contest an Indian election or that he cannot be a criminal because he has managed to file his nomination papers and to contest elections? By the same token, millions of foreign nationals who have regularly voted in Indian elections must all be Indian nationals simply because a perverse government has actually helped them to do so because in India the party ranks higher than the nation. This is puerile reasoning unbecoming of a Foreign Minister who ought to know the Indian context much better than a school boy. Such inability to separate what is from what ought to be is indeed the most irresponsible and deplorable kind of pretence in a senior minister of the Union cabinet. THE SENTINEL