Vijay Prashad December
17, 2019
Protests against India’s new
Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of
society outraged by the religious implications of this law.
On December 13, the United
Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law.
This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite
citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring
countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs,
Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. It does not name Muslims, despite the
fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted
in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the
Rohingyas). The UN said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations
to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level,
but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.
India’s ruling party—the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi put this bill
before both the lower and upper houses of India’s parliament. Apart from the
Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house (the Lok Sabha)
was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim
margin—125 votes to 105 votes.
Protests against the
Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of
society outraged by the religious implications of this law. There are 200
million Muslim citizens of India—almost 15 percent of the population; this bill
sends a clear message that they should see themselves as second-class citizens.
There is no other interpretation of the BJP’s agenda here.
The BJP government was
particularly ruthless against protests at two major universities—Jamia Millia
Islamia (New Delhi) and Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh), both historically
Muslim universities. The police have been extraordinarily violent against
student protests in the past several months, but this was at another level. At
Jamia, the police beat unarmed students, chased them into their dormitories and
continued to beat them, and fired tear gas into the library. There is video
evidence of policemen burning
buses, assaulting journalists, and creating the conditions of
a full-scale police-driven riot; in Aligarh, there is video evidence
of the police breaking student motorcycles.
Brinda Karat of the Communist
Party of India (Marxist), who went to Jamia during the attack, said, “The
police action is unacceptable.” Jamia, she said, must be “freed of police
presence and action be taken against those responsible.” The Delhi Police has announced that it “will investigate” the violence,
although Deputy Commissioner of Police M.S. Randhawa seemed to suggest that all
the violence came from the students, none from the police. Senior advocate
Indira Jaising appeared before the Supreme Court on December 16 to urge the bench—headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde—to
take up the case since the violence “is a very serious human rights violation
all over the country.”
As if on cue, the BJP
government hastily shut down internet access in India’s northeast, and in parts
of the country where the protests have been most virulent. Last year,
India led all other countries in internet shutdowns.
Overall, 67 percent of all shutdowns of the internet took place
in India; this year, already, 63 percent of all shutdowns have been in India.
Internet in Jammu and Kashmir has now been off for 136 days (between
August 4 and December 17); there is no sign that it will be restored. Indeed,
the suffocation of Jammu and Kashmir continues unabated. The Kashmir Chamber of
Commerce says that Kashmiri businesses have lost over $1.4 billion in this period.
Several state governments have
said that they would not fulfill the provisions of the new Citizenship Act,
since they argue that it is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of India will
soon discuss this bill. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front’s Chief Minister
Pinarayi Vijayan said, “We are accountable only to the ideals of the
Constitution of India, not to the fundamentalist ideology of the RSS-BJP.” (The
RSS refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist movement that is
behind the BJP.)
The Left parties have called for demonstrations on December 19 across the
country against the Citizenship Act.
Austerity
International Monetary Fund
(IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath is in India this week. She said that the slowdown of the Indian economy has
surprised many, “including us here at the IMF.” India’s Gross Domestic Product
growth has slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter. All the noises made by the
BJP government about “Make In India” are silenced by the slump in manufacturing
and the low domestic consumption.
Not surprisingly, the IMF
urges the Modi government to push ahead with its “structural reforms,” which include what is so
euphemistically called “labor… market reforms” and “fiscal consolidation.” The
former—labor market reform—means that the government should erase protections
for workers, and regulations of businesses; the latter—fiscal
consolidation—means that the government must cut spending to lower public debt
levels. This means less earning power for the majority of the population, and
lower government spending to create social programs for the public.
What the IMF proposes is what
the BJP government wants to do—to push a much deeper austerity agenda in India.
This is precisely what the
students and workers, the farmers and the youth have argued against in protest
upon protest.
The BJP government pushed for
a 150 percent rise in hostel fees for the flagship university in Delhi,
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This astronomical increase would force at least half the post-graduate students to
leave their studies. A #FeesMustFall protest dynamic opened up across the
country in solidarity with JNU, it being clear to the students that what
happens at JNU will spread outward. The police violence against unarmed
students was shocking. It was equally outrageous that the intelligence services
visited the home in Sopat, Jammu and Kashmir, of a former student leader—Aejaz
Ahmad Rather—and said to his family chillingly, “A bullet never asks
for an address.”
Farmer, peasant, and trade
union organizations have been consistently on the march against the
government’s various economic policies. In the past five months, the price of
onions—a good indicator of food inflation—spiked by 253 percent. Rather than fix the endemic
internal problems in the domestic onion market, a demand of the farmer and
peasant organizations, the BJP government has loosened rules for the import of
onions, a demand of the big traders. BJP policy is not made to benefit the
working class and peasantry. It is made on behalf of the big businesses. It is
almost as if the BJP-IMF slogan is “Save the Billionaires,” or “Billionaires
Bachao,” as Srujana Bodapati, the coordinator of the Delhi office of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes. Little wonder that the farmer, peasant, and trade
union federations have announced a major general strike for January 8, 2020. It
is expected that hundreds of millions of workers and peasants will be on the
streets on that day. Their charter of demands is a direct assault on the
BJP-IMF austerity policies.
The First Bullets
The temperature in India is very
high. The BJP government feels that it has a mandate to push through a
hard-right agenda, both in economic and social policy. It has received backing
for this from the IMF (in terms of labor market reform and bank reform) and
from its hard-right partners across the world (in terms of its citizenship and
anti-immigration policies).
But the government faces stiff
resistance that seems unwilling to abate. As night fell over Jamia, and the
fires burned out, Chandrasekhar Azad, the leader of the Bhim Army—a social
movement in nearby Uttar Pradesh—gave a powerful speech. He said that Muslims are an integral part of India, and
that if the State fires on Muslim students, “we will take the first bullets.”
This is the mood. It is something that the BJP and the RSS and the IMF need to
consider.
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