Protesters are speaking out against what they
say is a government bent on attacking diversity, the foundation on which India
was built.
By
Maria Abi-Habib and Sameer Yasir
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Protesters
at the Jama Masjid, a mosque in New Delhi, on Friday in a demonstration
against
India’s new citizenship law.Credit...Money Sharma/Agence
France-Presse
— Getty Images
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NEW
DELHI — Wearing Muslim
skullcaps, colorful turbans of Indian Sikhs or hip beanies of secular
university students, thousands protested at the largest mosque in India’s
capital on Friday, a turbulent scene that played out in multiple cities across
the country. They defied government curfews, internet shutdowns and the
divisive politics that have kept them apart for years.
The unrest, now in its second week and
increasingly violent, started over a contentious citizenship law that favors
every other South Asian faith over Islam. It has since evolved into a broader
fight over what demonstrators say is an increasingly authoritarian government
bent on dismantling India’s foundation: a secular nation that draws strength
from its diversity.
“You just needed a trigger,” said Jasbir
Singh, a Sikh information technology worker who joined the protests in
Bangalore this past week. “In India, religion never decided your citizenship,
and it should not in the future.”
More and more people are pouring into the
streets, and many have clashed with police officers. On Friday, six protesters
were killed in several towns in northern India, according to officials and the
Indian news media, as officers used water cannons, tear gas, wooden sticks and
— according to some reports — live ammunition against the demonstrators. At
least 14 lives have been lost since the first protests erupted.
The protests have emerged as the biggest
challenge yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his agenda. His governing
Bharatiya Janata Party has not shied away from articulating its vision of India
as a homeland for Hindus.
Mr. Modi has tried to play down the diversity
of the crowds, describing the protesters last Sunday as disgruntled Muslims and
saying that they could be “identified by their clothes.” But the anger over the
law is widespread, with Indians of various political stripes, creeds and
backgrounds worried that one religion could become dominant.
It has galvanized university students,
mirroring a pushback against conservative forces around the world. It has drawn
in activists, intellectuals and professionals, continuing a long tradition of
protests in India.
And it has prompted a global backlash. The
United Nations and various rights groups condemned the law, while some American
lawmakers called for sanctions.
“Those who want to implement discriminatory
laws want to do a second partition, as if the millions dying in the first one
wasn’t enough,” said Mr. Singh, the technology worker, referring to the bloody
sectarian violence that unfolded in 1947 when the subcontinent was split,
establishing India and Pakistan. “After seeing so many people protesting in
Mumbai and Bangalore yesterday, I feel that old India is still alive.”
Protesters are also growing tired of Mr.
Modi’s sectarianism as the economy sputters. At the polls, some Indians had put
aside their apprehension of the prime minister, attracted to his economic
plans. The country’s growth rate has now fallen to its lowest level in six
years.
“A lot of people voted for Modi because of
the economic issues and corruption. Now, the economy is in real bad shape and
corruption has not gone down,” said Aadhira Gaikwad, 26, an advertising
professional who protested in Mumbai. “All he is doing is using religion to
hide under the real issues.”
“When the prime minister of this country says
protesters can be identified by their clothes, it just fuels the fire,” Ms.
Gaikwad added. “This is what he has done all these years.”
For India’s Muslim population, the protests
are deeply personal. Muslims have watched the rise of Hindu nationalism under
Mr. Modi with a wary eye.
Dozens of Muslims have been lynched by angry
Hindu mobs, with the perpetrators often walking free. The country’s only
Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, was stripped of its autonomy in
August, and thousands of young men and elected politicians were detained
without being charged. And the Supreme Court, in a case known as “Ayodhya,”
ruled that a temple could be built at the site where a centuries-old mosque
once stood before a Hindu mob tore it down.
Until now, Muslims had largely remained
quiet, hoping that sectarian relations could be restored. But when the
government passed the citizenship law this month, many felt they had to
mobilize or risk losing even more.
“We are at a tipping point now,” said
Mohammad Abduzar, 26, from Merut in Uttar Pradesh State. “When Kashmir
happened, when Ayodhya happened, no one questioned our citizenship. We were
still first-class citizens. But how much longer do we have? How much further
can this government push the envelope?”
Many Muslims fear that they could be stripped
of their nationality because of changes the Modi government is making. Along
with the new law, the government plans to expand a citizenship test used in
Assam State to other states. When the test was applied this fall in Assam
State, about two million of its 33 million people failed, many of them Muslim.
If expanded, those tests would force Indians
to produce land deeds, birth certificates and other documents to prove their
lineage in the country, which could be difficult for many people who do not
always have such records.
Under the new law, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs,
Parsees, Buddhists and Jains would have an expedited path to citizenship even
if they fail the citizenship test. But
Muslims, India’s second largest religious group, at 200 million, would not have
the same legal protection.
For Mr. Abduzar, panic recently set in when
he and his father, Ahmad, realized that their names were misspelled on a school
certificate and a passport. For years they had viewed the mistakes as nothing
more than a nuisance, so commonplace that even bureaucrats dismissed the errors
as the sloppy work of government clerks.
Now, such blunders could render them
stateless.
India’s traditionally liberal-minded Supreme
Court has agreed to hear more than four dozen challenges to the
constitutionality of the law granting exemptions to certain religions. In the
past, the court has thrown out many restrictive social policies, like a ban on
gay sex, and has guarded privacy concerns. Critics say the citizenship law is
unconstitutional because it discriminates based on religion, stripping away the
state’s secular foundation.
Taken aback by the robust opposition, the
government has tried to tamp down worries, insisting that Indian Muslims would
not lose their nationality and that the law was aimed at providing a haven for
persecuted religious minorities in neighboring countries. The citizenship test
is necessary, the government says, to identify undocumented immigrants and
ensure the country’s security.
“It is hypocritical for the government to be
offering safety to religious minorities they say are persecuted, when they
discriminate against their own, against Indian Muslims,” said Akhtarista
Ansari, a 19-year-old university student in Delhi who is Muslim and was part of
the protests this week.
Their criticism is rooted in the ideologies
of Mr. Modi’s base.
Officials in his party, the B.J.P., and its
powerful affiliates believe that minorities have been granted special
protections at the expense of the country’s Hindus, who make up about 80
percent of the overall population of 1.3 billion. Many right-wing Hindus hold
particular animosity for Muslims, as they were ruled for several centuries by
the Mughal Muslim empire.
Sharad Sharma, a leader of Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, an organization affiliated with the B.J.P. and classified by the
Central Intelligence Agency as a Hindu militant group, said the days when the
Indian government would appease the country’s minorities were over.
“Everyone living in India is a Hindu,
including Muslims and Christians,” Mr. Sharma said, voicing a common right-wing
refrain that all Indians were Hindus until they were forcefully converted.
“They have to be subservient to Hindus and
Hinduism,” he added.
In this environment, conservative Hindus feel
increasingly empowered.
When a Muslim was hired to teach Sanskrit at
Banaras Hindu University, Hindu students protested, saying that it was improper
for a Muslim to teach the primary liturgical language of Hinduism.
After another professor at the university,
Shanti Lal Salvi, spoke in that instructor’s defense, he was attacked by
students and had to flee the campus for his safety.
“There is a piousness everywhere, it is
spreading and it is becoming very difficult to live in this atmosphere,” said
Mr. Salvi, a Hindu. “This university was once considered a melting pot of
ideas.”
“This kind of hatred now has an official
sanction,” he said, “and it will only get stronger with every passing day.”
The wave of protests around India has left
the government unprepared, and security forces have resorted to heavy-handed
tactics to quell the demonstrations.
Hundreds have been detained. Opposition
politicians and activists were arrested as they staged peaceful protests on
Friday outside the house of Amit Shah, Mr. Modi’s right-hand man and the
country’s powerful home minister, overseeing domestic security.
In an episode that was captured on video and
disseminated widely on social media, five female students at Delhi’s Jamia
Millia Islamia University rescued an unarmed male student the police were
beating with wooden sticks last weekend.
While right-wing Hindus and governing party
officials tried to paint the female students as radical Islamists, they
conspicuously omitted that one was a Hindu. That student, Chandra Yadav, 20,
studies Hindi literature and, like other secular Indians, also protested in
opposition to the citizenship bill.
“This fight is not about Ram or Allah,” Ms.
Yadav said, referring to a Hindu deity.
“This fight is for a state that is supposed
to be for everyone, Hindu or Muslim,” she added. “As much as this country
belongs to me, it belongs to Muslims.”
Jeffrey Gettleman and Suhasini Raj
contributed reporting.
