The Citizenship Amendment Act: India’s Anti-Muslim Law
‘Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state.’
– Dexter Filkins, Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India, The New Yorker, 2 December 2019
Sweeping new religion-based citizenship laws, a national check of official residency papers, the revoking of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, and internment camps. These are the frightening actions of the Modi Government’s moves to extricate Muslim’s from India and turn it into a Hindu state. A terrifying vision of religious cleansing.
How has India moved so far away from Gandhi and Nehru’s vision?
The Indian Constitution provides all persons, equality and protection before the law. It was created as a secular state, where religious discrimination against its citizens was prohibited. The Modi Government’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) makes a person’s faith the basis for citizenship and turns the main issue here into one of human rights.
This Act which came into force on 11 December last year redefines what it means to be Indian by making almost 200 million Muslims, aliens in their country. It has caused widespread unrest for the past few months with tens of thousands of people protesting across India, particularly in areas along the Bangladesh border, such as Assam, where residents believe that they will be "overrun" by immigrants moving across the border.
Will this end in Partition 2.0?
One part of the move to remove Muslims involves a National Register of Citizens that will identify all those holding official citizenship documents. The first state to complete the register was Assam, which resulted in 2 million Muslim residents being declared foreigners, some of whom will be placed in the new detention camps.
The national register may progress through the entire country, but in reality it is still possible a full register may not eventuate. There are two reasons for this: first, many regional governments are political opponents of Modi and second, because of the impracticality of checking such vast numbers of people, many of whom simply do not have official paperwork – regardless of their religion.
The unfortunate reality is that this Act is the latest in a list of changes instituted by the Modi Government over his past six years. Between 2014 and 2016, a Government Order approved Long Term Visas for non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, allowing them to stay without valid travel documents and then eventually apply for citizenship. Then there was the revoking of the only Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir’s partial autonomy in August 2019.
Slowly but surely, across India, Muslims will soon be deemed non-citizens and thousands, perhaps millions, will be relocated to one of the 10 internment camps under construction.
The public face of President Trump’s visit to India this week did not appear to include discussion of human rights issues relating to any of Modi’s actions to cleanse his country of Muslims. Much like his visit to China, Trump did not discuss the Uyghurs. No one wants to upset these economic powerhouses.
Right now, we are on the verge of seeing yet another country incarcerate part of their population based on religion. In the absence of political leadership and action, it is left to the United Nations, the odd politician, the media, and individual voices like ours, to keep awareness of this issue front of mind.
References
‘India Plans Big Detention Camps for Migrants. Muslims Are Afraid’, New York Times, 17 August 2019
‘India builds detention camps for Assam 'foreigners’’, DW, 17 September 2019
‘India’s massive, scary new detention camps, explained. The Indian government stripped citizenship from 2 million people, mostly Muslims. Now it wants to put them in camps’, Vox, 17 September 2019
‘Detention Centres in Assam’, Wikipedia
'How is it human?': India's largest detention centre almost ready’, Al Jazeera, 2 January 2020
‘Many Indian states 'will not implement' Modi's citizenship law’, Al Jazeera, 4 January 2020
Photo credit: Ian Kennedy, Flickr