- India's parliament passed a new amendment to its citizenship law earlier this month, providing a pathway to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian religious minorities while singling out its minority Muslim population.
- The amended act has been slammed by critics and has sparked deadly protests around the country.
- The fight that has erupted over the citizenship bill is reflective of the country's rising tide of bigotry directed towards minorities, in particular, its Muslim population, which makes up about 14% of the country's massive 1.3 billion people.
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A controversial amendment to a law was recently passed in India, sparking deadly protests around the country and leading some to question the country's democratic values.
On December 11, India's parliament passed an amendment to its Citizenship Act of 1955, which sets out guidelines for becoming a citizen in the country. The 2019 revision added a religious element to the bill, providing a pathway to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian religious minorities who fled neighboring Muslim-majority countries Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.
The amended act has been slammed by critics as anti-Islam, and they say it further marginalizes India's sizeable Muslim minority. Violent protests have erupted across the country in response, resulting in the deaths of six people. Dozens more have been arrested or injured in clashes with police.
The fight that has erupted over the citizenship bill is reflective of the country's rising tide of bigotry directed towards minorities, in particular, its Muslim population, which makes up about 14% of the country's massive 1.3 billion people.
The bill has also handed more power to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist government in crafting a country which affords more rights to its Hindu majority and leaves room for further discrimination in the areas of governance and public space.
What exactly does the bill say?
India's Citizenship Act was first established in 1955 and created comprehensive guidelines related to citizenship in the country.
It has been amended several times, including at 2003 amendment that authorized the government to keep a national register of all of its citizens (referred to as the NRC). Today, the register has not yet been implemented except in the northeastern state of Assam, which is home to a Muslim-majority population.
The most recent changes to the Citizenship Act (often referred to locally as CAB or CAA) were passed by India's lower house of parliament - the Lok Sabha - on December 10, before being cleared by the upper house of parliament - the Rajya Sabha - a day later. The bill was signed into law by President Ram Nath Kovind.
The bill was introduced by Indian home affairs minister Amit Shah, a leading member of Modi's right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and it promised to provide refuge for persecuted religious minorities from three neighboring Muslim-majority countries who entered India before 2015.
Notably, the act excludes Muslim migrants "as they do not face religious persecution in these Islamic countries," India's parliament said in a statement after the bill's passage.
The bill also leaves out two neighboring Buddhist countries, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, which have experienced major refugee crises in recent years. There are about 59,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees residing in over 100 camps in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, according to Indian magazine Frontline, and about 30,000 that live outside these camps.
The bill also ignores what the UN has deemed the world's most persecuted minority, the Rohingya Muslims, who suffered ethnic and religious cleansing at the hands of the Burmese military in Myanmar. Authorities have reportedly pledged to deport the estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees currently residing in India, despite facing danger in their home state.
"The only religion that the Modi government follows is the Constitution of India," the statement added.
In the statement, Shah "reiterated that the Bill is not against any Minority in India and the rights of each Indian Citizen will be equally protected."
The bill does not apply to Assam and other indigenous areas.
A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called the act "discriminatory in nature" and said it undermines India's democratic framework:
"While the goal of protecting persecuted groups is welcome, this should be done through a robust national asylum system that is premised on the principle of equality and non-discrimination, and which applies to all people in need of protection from persecution and other human rights violations, with no distinction as to race, religion, national origin or other prohibited grounds."
"The law isn't truly about protecting the region's religious minorities," wrote Ravi Agrawal and Kathryn Salam of Foreign Policy. "Instead, it challenges India's secularism by making religion part of the basis for citizenship."
The Citizenship Act has spurred thousands of people from human rights groups, universities and religious groups to come out in protest this month. On December 15, clashes between police and students escalated on two Muslim university campuses - Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh and of Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi - resulting in police using batons and tear gas on students.
The unrest has even led authorities to deploy army personnel and impose a curfew in Assam, as protests boil over.
This is not the first time the government has targeted its Muslim population
India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has taken steps to further marginalize the country's Muslim population since coming into power in 2014.
The NRC's exclusive use in Assam has been derided by critics as a way to of stoking religious tensions. According to a 2011 census, Muslims makeup nearly 35% of Assam's population, and are a majority in eight of the state's districts.
In August, 1.9 million people from the region were excluded from the register, effectively stripping them of citizenship. Amnesty International has criticized the NRC and says it leaves the futures of millions of people in the region uncertain.
In September, India began construction on a large-scale detention center in the Goalpara district of Assam meant to hold at least 3,000 detainees, according to Reuters.
And in August, India also revoked part of its constitution which gave the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir a special status and quasi-independence. Over the past four months, Kashmir, which is home to a significant Muslim population, has been off from communication, held on lockdown, and is now directly under the control of India's federal government in New Delhi.
As part of shutting down communication, residents in Kashmir have lost access to phone lines and the internet. According to advocacy groups, the internet shutdown in the region is the longest-ever crackdown imposed on a democracy. Only authoritarian countries, like China and Myanmar, have experienced longer internet shutdowns.
The four-month internet blackout has been so severe that WhatsApp is deleting the accounts of residents in the region because they've been inactive for so long.
State-sanctioned discrimination against Muslims has had dire consequences
The Modi government's attitudes and policies towards minority groups has sparked racially motivated clashes, and observers say that the ruling Hindu party has fostered a culture of impunity through its inaction in addressing violence.
Shah, who crafted the citizenship bill, vowed in April to throw illegal Muslim immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh into the Bay of Bengal. He has also previously referred to illegal immigrants as "termites."
India has also seen an increase in attacks against its Muslim minority in recent months. A February 2019 report from Human Rights Watch found that between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 36 Muslims were killed across 12 Indian states. Roughly 280 people were injured across 20 states during the same period, the rights group added.
In a particularly gruesome case last year, an eight-year-old Muslim girl was kidnapped, raped, and killed in Jammu and Kashmir by a group of Hindu men with the intention of committing the crime in order to drive away Muslim nomads in the area.
The country has also seen a crackdown on protests, attacks on the free press, and history books have been rewritten in favor of Hindu achievements.
India is inching towards fascism
Experts have noted that India is straying away from its democratic values under the Bharatiya Janata Party.
"There is absolute political consensus within the Bharatiya Janata Party that India is culturally a Hindu country," Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Los Angeles Times.
Harish Pullanoor, an editor at Quartz India, wrote in 2016 that India was "displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism," including the disenfranchisement of religious minorities.
"The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders," wrote Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher, who wrote of a list of features that define a fascist state.
In April, several Muslim merchants in Old Delhi described fears of religiously-motivated violence against them.
"I could be lynched right now and nobody would do anything about it," Abdul Adnan, a Muslim businessman, told The New York Times. "My government doesn't even consider me Indian. How can that be when my ancestors have lived here hundreds of years?"
According to The Times, the consensus among Indian activists and liberal political analysts is that the country, under Modi, has become "more toxically divided between Hindus and Muslims."
"In plain language, they are what we now call communal fascists," Aditya Mukherjee, a retired historian told The Times.
Historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post in August that it was time to downgrade India's status as a world-class democracy.
"Given the lack of any sort of credible opposition to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the atmosphere of fear among religious minorities and the attacks on a free press, we are now a 40-60 democracy," he wrote of India.