[State authorities are rapidly expanding foreigner tribunals and planning to build huge new detention camps. Hundreds of people have been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign migrant — including a Muslim veteran of the Indian Army. Local activists and lawyers say the pain of being left off a preliminary list of citizens and the prospect of being thrown into jail have driven dozens to suicide.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
 |
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A government official in
Kharupetia, in the Indian state of Assam, collected
documents from people
hoping to be included on an official list of Indian
citizens. The citizenship
of millions is at risk. Credit Saumya
Khandelwal for The New
York Times
|
NEW
DELHI — More than four
million people in India, mostly Muslims, are at risk of being declared foreign
migrants as the government pushes a hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda that has
challenged the country’s pluralist traditions and aims to redefine what it
means to be Indian.
The hunt for migrants is unfolding in Assam,
a poor, hilly state near the borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many of the
people whose citizenship is now being questioned were born in India and have
enjoyed all the rights of citizens, such as voting in elections.
State authorities are rapidly expanding
foreigner tribunals and planning to build huge new detention camps. Hundreds of
people have been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign migrant — including a
Muslim veteran of the Indian Army. Local activists and lawyers say the pain of
being left off a preliminary list of citizens and the prospect of being thrown
into jail have driven dozens to suicide.
But the governing party of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi is not backing down.
Instead, it is vowing to bring this campaign
to force people to prove they are citizens to other parts of India, part of a
far-reaching Hindu nationalist program fueled by Mr. Modi’s sweeping
re-election victory in May and his stratospheric popularity.
Members of India’s Muslim minority are
growing more fearful by the day. Assam’s anxiously watched documentation of
citizenship — a drive that began years ago and is scheduled to wrap up on Aug.
31 — coincides with another setback for Muslims, this one transpiring more than
a thousand miles away.
Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Modi
unilaterally wiped out the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state,
Jammu and Kashmir, removing its special autonomy and turning it into a federal
territory without any consultation with local leaders — many of whom have since
been arrested.
Among Mr. Modi’s critics, events in Assam and
Kashmir are Exhibits A and B in their conviction that the prime minister is
using the early months of his second term to push the most forceful and
divisive Hindu nationalist agenda ever attempted in India and to fundamentally
reconfigure the concept of Indian identity to be synonymous with being Hindu.
Many Indians, on both sides of the political divide, see Assam and Kashmir as
harbingers of the direction Mr. Modi will take this nation of 1.3 billion
people in the coming years.
The stated purpose of the citizenship dragnet
in Assam is to find undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh — a predominantly
Muslim country to its south. Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister, has
repeatedly referred to those immigrants as “termites.’’
All of the 33 million residents of Assam have
had to prove, with documentary evidence, that they or their ancestors were
Indian citizens before early 1971, when Bangladesh was established after
breaking away from Pakistan. That is not easy. Many families are racing to get
their hands on a decades-old property deed or fraying birth certificate with an
ancestor’s name on it.
Beyond this, Mr. Modi’s government has tried
to pass a bill in Parliament that carves out exemptions for Hindus, Buddhists,
Christians and people from other religions — but leaves out Muslims.
Mr. Modi’s critics say he is playing a
dangerous game and pulling apart the diverse, delicate social fabric that has
existed in India for centuries.
The prime minister’s political roots lie in a
Hindu nationalist movement that emphasizes the religion’s supremacy. This
worldview has a long history of sowing division between the country’s Hindu
majority and Muslim minority, at times exploding in violence.
Assam has been hit by its own troubles and
ethnic bloodshed. But the violence being reported now is self-inflicted.
Noor Begum, who lived in a small hamlet in a
flood-soaked district, spiraled into depression after finding out that she and
her mother had been excluded from the citizenship lists. Her father and seven
siblings had made it.
It didn’t make any sense to the family: Why,
if they all lived together and were born in the same place, would some be
considered Indian while others illegal foreigners?
“Of course she was Indian,” said her father,
Abdul Kalam, a retired laborer. “She used to sing Indian national songs at
school. She felt very Indian.”
On a bright morning in June, Noor hanged herself
from a rafter. She was 14.
Many Muslims in Kashmir are despondent as
well. After Mr. Modi’s government erased Kashmir’s autonomy, thousands of
outraged Kashmiris took to the streets, only to be locked down by a heavy
deployment of security forces and a smothering communications blackout.
Kashmir has long been a flash point. Both
India and Pakistan control different parts of it and several times, the
tensions have driven the two nuclear armed rivals to war or dangerously close
to it.
Though the Indian government has eased some
of the communication restrictions in the past few days, hundreds of Kashmiri
intellectuals are still under arrest and Pakistan is seething.
The tension with Pakistan tends to lift Mr.
Modi’s political fortunes. His forceful stand against India’s No. 1 enemy just
adds to his image as an unswerving patriot and one of the most decisive and
powerful prime ministers India has produced in decades.
Many in India’s Hindu majority don’t object
to Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies or even seem to think too much about
them. They praise what they see as the strides he has made in fighting poverty
and projecting a more muscular image of India on the world stage.
But critics say his Hindu nationalist beliefs
are central to who he is and intentionally divisive, engineered to win votes
from the Hindu majority. India is about 80 percent Hindu and 14 percent Muslim.
(Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists make up most of the rest of the
population.)
A small but vocal minority of left-leaning
intellectuals, Muslim leaders and opposition politicians has tried to turn
public opinion against Mr. Modi’s policies without much success.
What is happening in Assam and Kashmir “is an
assault on the very imagination of India, of the freedom struggle, of the
Constitution, of the idea of a country in which everyone belongs equally,” said
Harsh Mander, a former civil servant turned human rights activist.
“Muslims are the enemy,” he said. “It’s a war
on the Indian Constitution.”
Ashutosh Varshney, the head of Brown
University’s South Asia program, said that India “in all probability and unless
checked is headed toward a Hindu nationalist, majoritarian state.”
With the political opposition in total
disarray and all government agencies — especially the bureaucracy and the
security apparatus — firmly in Mr. Modi’s hands, Mr. Varshney said the only
hope for India’s secular democracy is in the courts.
But, he cautioned, “The judiciary might well
surrender.”
Even a streak of alarming headlines in recent
weeks, including big job losses in the auto sector, deadly flooding across the
country and a new outbreak of violence by Hindu mobs against Muslims, hasn’t
dented Mr. Modi’s popularity.
Outsiders may wonder how any political
movement in India could question Muslims’ contribution to society. India is a
thoroughly multicultural place, and Muslims have contributed for centuries,
even ruling the country at times. Muslim emperors built some of India’s
brightest cultural treasures, including the Taj Mahal.
But since Mr. Modi took office in 2014,
government bodies have rewritten history books, lopping out sections on Muslim
rulers, and changed official place names to Hindu from Muslim. Hindu mobs have
lynched dozens of Muslims; participants are rarely punished.
Mr. Modi and allies in his Bharatiya Janata
Party, known as the B.J.P., have denied any anti-Muslim bias and rejected
criticism that the way they have handled the mass citizenship check in Assam
has been harsh or discriminatory. State level officials in Assam said this was
purely an administrative exercise to ferret out people who have no legal right
to stay in India.
Rupam Goswami, a spokesman for the state
B.J.P. party, said the registry “is only a process of documentation.”
Like much of India, Assam has reflected a
tapestry of different ethnic groups and religions for as long as anyone can
remember. Its beautiful tea estates have attracted flocks of migrant workers.
But many indigenous Assamese, who are mostly
Hindu, have resented immigrants from Bangladesh, saying that the ethnic
Bengalis were coming into their state and taking away their jobs and their
land. In 1983, this locals-versus-outsider enmity blew up.
Assamese villagers slaughtered more than
1,000 ethnic Bengalis, many of them Muslim — scholars say that most ethnic
Bengalis in Assam are Muslim. In 2012, another smaller wave of violence
erupted.
The next year, India’s Supreme Court set in
motion a process for a large-scale registration of citizens to be updated in
Assam. This would determine who was an Indian and who was not. The deadline for
residents to provide documentary proof that they or their ancestors have a
legacy as Indian citizens, going back to March 1971 or earlier, has been extended
several times.
Though this issue predates Mr. Modi’s taking
India’s reins in 2014, the B.J.P. has aggressively backed the process, with Mr.
Shah vowing to clear out all the “termites.’’
When a preliminary Assam citizenship list was
published in 2018, leaving off four million people, scholars said the majority
were Muslim but large numbers of Bengali-speaking Hindus were also excluded.
The B.J.P. then had to regroup. Its response
was to push a new citizenship bill that said migrants from neighboring
countries who were Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsees or Jains would
be eligible for Indian citizenship. One of South Asia’s biggest religious
groups was conspicuously left off: Muslims.
The government said it was trying to help
religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. To critics, it
looked like another anti-Muslim campaign, plain and simple.
The bill sailed through the lower house of
Parliament but stalled after many Assamese politicians said they didn’t like
the religious dimension the B.J.P. was injecting — or the possibility that the
large number of Hindu Bengalis would be given an exception. Some B.J.P.
politicians say they want to revive it.
Many of the people whose names were left off
the list were born in India, lived here all their lives and were considered
citizens in every right.
One of them was Mohammed Sanaullah, a retired
army captain. In May, he was picked up on suspicion of being an illegal migrant
and jailed for nearly two weeks.
Mr. Sanaullah said he was totally
demoralized.
“I am an Indian, my father is an Indian, my
grandfather was an Indian, my forefathers were Indian. They were all born in
India. We will be Indian forever,” he said.
The Assam state government sends suspected
foreign migrants to foreigner tribunals, a growing network of more than 100
small courts where the onus is on the suspects to provide the proof that the
government is demanding. Human rights observers have complained that the
proceedings often discriminate against Muslims and are the equivalent of sham
trials.
The B.J.P. doesn’t want to stop at Assam.
Mr. Shah and other party leaders have
promised their supporters that they will bring mass citizenship reviews across
the country. Human rights activists fear these could be used to discriminate
against minorities and this will be made easier because, under Supreme Court
rules, individuals are allowed to legally challenge another’s citizenship.
More than 3.5 million people who have so far
been left off the Assam citizenship list have filed challenges to their
exclusion, and state-level officials are reviewing these claims.
But Assam is not waiting. The state
government, which is controlled by an arm of the B.J.P., is planning to build
10 new detention camps with the capacity to hold thousands of people.
Bangladesh has not been eager to accept the
ethnic Bengalis in Assam as citizens either. That could leave many languishing
in a legal no-man’s land without many rights.
Critics say what is happening in both Assam
and Kashmir (the state has a population of about 14 million) is an attempt to
change the demographics in favor of Hindus. Kashmiris fear the government’s
real plan in wiping out their autonomy is to pave the way to resettle large
numbers of Hindu Indians in Kashmir and end its status as the one
Muslim-majority territory in India.
Under the changes, Kashmiris will lose the
special land rights they used to hold that made it difficult for non-Kashmiris
to buy land in their state. Mr. Modi has argued that the new arrangement will
bring outside investment, better governance and a “new dawn.”
But other Indian states have similar
protections for local residents and Mr. Modi’s party is not trying to change
those.
Critics say the difference is obvious: Those
states are not Muslim.
