I was watching a cow walk from one state to another the other day and the cow did not have a voter ID or an Aadhaar or a passport or a ration card and the cow did not need any of those things because the cow just walked across whatever boundary humans have drawn on a map and no one stopped it and no one asked it to prove where it came from and no one threatened to lynch it for being in the wrong place. And I sat there thinking about the fact that this cow has more freedom of movement in my country than I do because I am a human who was born in this country and I have voted in elections and paid taxes and done everything a citizen is supposed to do and yet I have to carry a stack of papers everywhere I go just to prove that I have a right to be in the place where I was born. Anyone can ask me to prove who I am and whether I belong here and if I do not have the right combination of documents at the right moment I could be detained or deported or beaten to death by a mob and the people who do it will be celebrated for protecting the nation from outsiders like me.

The SIR process has made this explicit because now the Election Commission is going door to door asking every voter to prove they were on the electoral rolls from 2002 or 2004 or whatever year the state last had an intensive revision and if you cannot produce a document for yourself and your parents and sometimes your grandparents then your name gets removed and you become a suspected foreigner in your own country. There is no single document that proves citizenship in India and the government has said so itself because the passport is just a travel document and the Aadhaar is just an identity number and the voter ID is just for voting and the ration card is just for food and so on down the line until the citizen stands before the state with empty hands and the state says prove you belong here using a document we never gave you. A country that cannot tell its citizens what proves they are citizens has no right to keep asking them to prove it and a country that built its constitution on the bedrock of brotherhood has no right to treat its own people like suspects in their own land.

They say this is about catching illegal immigrants and maybe some of it is but the machinery catches everyone and the burden falls on the poorest and the darkest and the most vulnerable and the migrant who moved across states for work and the woman whose name is spelled differently on different documents and the family that lost their papers in a flood fifty years ago. One single fat man sitting in a chair somewhere decided that all of us need to prove ourselves again and billions of man hours are being burned on this exercise while most of the country claps because they think it will only catch the other person and it never occurs to them that the machinery that catches the other person today will catch them tomorrow. I do not know if this country can be fixed anymore because the problem is not the politicians or the laws or the bureaucracy and the problem is the people who clap while their neighbors are stripped of their rights and the people who think belonging can be proved with a piece of paper and the people who have forgotten that a nation is supposed to be a place where you belong not a place where you constantly have to prove that you do.

Tell me if you have ever been asked to prove you belong where you were born. I am @troysk704.