India’s government has pushed
through a dangerous new bill that has provoked a mass
uprising. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) offers a fast-track to
legalization for Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Buddhist and Jain immigrants
from bordering nations while explicitly denying one religious group the same
privileges. For years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) has been chipping away at the rights of Muslims in India, but the world’s
largest democracy may have finally overplayed its hand on the deepest question
in any country: who belongs and who does not.
Before the passage of the CAA,
the BJP tested an equally ominous policy in the northeastern Indian state of
Assam, which shares lengthy borders with numerous nations, including Myanmar
and Bangladesh. The National
Register of Citizens (NRC), mandated by a law passed years earlier,
was implemented in Assam and required Indians to prove their ancestry with hard
documentation in order to be considered citizens—a mean feat in a poor state
with high levels of illiteracy.
Nearly 2 million Assamese were
unable to meet the qualifications, and fears abounded that they would be held
in detention
camps being built under the Home Ministry’s oversight. Now, the Modi
government has announced that the NRC will be implemented in all 29 Indian
states. Taken
together with the CAA, it’s no wonder that India’s 200 million Muslims fear
this could be the first step toward their country declaring them illegal
immigrants.
Modi
is often compared to President Donald Trump—and with good reason. In
addition to the strong affinity the two leaders seem to share for one another,
both came to power in secular democracies as populists promising economic
prosperity and crackdowns on immigrants and Muslims. The NRC/CAA debacle in
India parallels the legal fight that Trump provoked when he signed an executive
order requiring the U.S. census to add a
citizenship question.
Just as the Trump
administration has claimed that its xenophobic policies are about combating
human trafficking, the Modi government maintains it’s actually looking out
for immigrants’ welfare. The CAA was purportedly written to
offer refuge to persecuted minorities in nations bordering India, yet
the group that best fits that definition would be Myanmar’s
Rohingya—a population that has become a target of genocidal policies
precisely because it is composed of Muslims living in a Buddhist-majority
nation. Now it appears as though predominantly Hindu India has shut its doors
to Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar’s pogroms.
About 14% of
India’s population is Muslim—similar to the
percentages of African Americans or Latinos in the U.S. More than 10%
of the world’s entire Muslim population resides in India, which is second only
to Indonesia for the largest Muslim population in the world. For years under
BJP rule, Indian Muslims have faced lynch
mobs attacking them for their religious beliefs under the guise that
they were enforcing beef-eating bans. These mobs are directly linked to the
right-wing Hindu nationalist government, and almost
all the recorded instances of Muslim persecution have occurred since
Modi assumed office in 2014.
Despite all this, Modi’s party
earned a second five-year term after claiming a resounding reelection
victory earlier this year. An unconstitutional crackdown on Kashmir this
past summer and a recent Supreme
Court ruling allowing Hindus to build a temple over the ruins of an
ancient mosque site claimed by both Hindus and Muslims have only added to the
tensions that have erupted with the CAA’s passage.
With this new law, Modi may
have finally overplayed his hand. Mass
protests have broken out all over India, leading to a violent police
crackdown, and Human
Rights Watch has warned the government to stop using “unnecessary
lethal force against demonstrators.” University campuses have become battlegrounds, police
have been documented beating dissenting students with batons. Peaceful
protests have resulted in mass
arrests of thousands of people at a time.
The state of Uttar Pradesh
(UP), which has a large Muslim population, has been an epicenter of resistance
and corresponding police violence. A majority of the 25 people killed in
protests so far were from UP, and the state government has threatened to
confiscate the property of dissenters in retaliation. An Indian Muslim actress
and activist named Sadaf
Jafar was beaten and arrested in UP’s capital, Lucknow, while filming
the protests.
The BJP has also resorted to
the dictatorial tactic of shutting
down internet access in areas where protests are taking place. India
has earned the distinction of having the largest
number of government-ordered internet shutdowns in the world—more than
Pakistan, Syria or Turkey—in its ongoing response to protests.
Whether the protests will
translate into a loss of political power for the BJP is not yet clear. But if
recent elections in the state of Jharkhand are any indication, there is hope
that its stranglehold on India could be weakened. (The ruling
party won only 25 out of 81 seats in late December.)
Seemingly flabbergasted by the
response to the CAA, Modi tweeted earlier
this month: “Violent protests on the Citizenship Amendment Act are unfortunate
and deeply distressing.” He made no mention of the violence emerging from
police or from the Gestapo-like
militants wielding sticks and marching in formation through the
streets of Indian cities pledging allegiance to Modi’s government.
Echoing the paranoia and false
claims of persecution that we have become familiar with from Trump in the
U.S., Modi has
declared in Orwellian terms: “People who are trying to spread lies and fear,
look at my work. If you see any trace of divisiveness in my work, show it to
the world.” He has accused protesters of “trying every tactic to push me out of
power.”
Far from being deterred by the
police crackdowns and internet shutoffs, the CAA and the Modi government’s
response to dissent appears to have given protesters renewed energy.
Promisingly, it is not just Indian Muslims who are protesting, but people
of all religions in the multifaith nation. Twenty
thousand people marched in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, the
day after Christmas. One government official told Reuters,
“I really did not see the protests coming”—by which he meant that he did not
expect non-Muslims to care as much.
One Hindu woman who was an
ardent Modi supporter told The
New York Times, “I used to see Modi as a strong leader, as the person India
had been waiting so long to get.” She added, “Now, I see him as a monster.”
RELATED ARTICLES
BY RAKSHA KUMAR
No comments:
Post a Comment