[In India’s northeast, violent protests broke out against the measure, which some believe will bring demographic change. States such as Assam have long witnessed tensions surrounding the arrival of Bengali-speaking migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, who locals fear will alter their culture. Now the citizenship measure will help non-Muslim migrants to become citizens and settle outside of areas designated for indigenous people.]
By Joanna Slater and Niha Masih
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Demonstrators
protest the Citizenship Amendment Bill in New Delhi on Tuesday.
(Adnan
Abidi/Reuters)
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NEW
DELHI — Lawmakers in India
are expected to enact a fundamental change to its citizenship law to include
religion as a criterion for nationality for the first time, deepening concerns
that a country founded on secular ideals is becoming a Hindu state that treats
Muslims as second-class citizens.
The new law creates a path to citizenship for
migrants who belong to several South Asian religions but pointedly excludes
Islam, the faith practiced by 200 million Indian citizens.
The measure is poised for a final vote in the
upper house of India’s parliament late Wednesday. If it passes, it will mark
the latest political victory for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a
strident nationalist in the mold of other right-leaning populist politicians
around the globe.
Since winning a landslide reelection victory
in May, Modi has moved swiftly to implement his party’s agenda of emphasizing
Hindu primacy in India, a diverse democracy home to more than 1.3 billion
people.
Hindu nationalist ideologues view India’s
history as a series of humiliations — centuries of rule by Muslim kings
followed by British colonialism — that must be redressed.
They despise the secularism embraced by
India’s founders, who sought to create a country where all faiths were treated
equally. And they accuse India’s previous leaders of pandering to religious
minorities, especially Muslims, in search of votes.
Now, in just months, Modi has achieved some
of their top objectives. In August, he reversed seven decades of policy in
Kashmir, stripping the Muslim-majority state of its autonomy and instituting a
crackdown that endures to this day. Last month, India’s Supreme Court
greenlighted the construction of a grand Hindu temple at the site of a 16th
century mosque illegally razed by Hindu extremists in 1992.
The government has also engaged in
increasingly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. The country’s powerful interior
minister has called migrants who entered the country illegally “termites” and
pledged to expel them. Earlier this year, Indian authorities completed a
byzantine process aimed at identifying migrants in the northeastern state of
Assam. Nearly 1.9 million people were left off the final list, raising the risk
that they could be rendered stateless or deported.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill, which was
passed by the lower house of parliament earlier this week and is expected to
pass the upper house later Wednesday — is another priority. It is effectively
an amnesty for all Hindus, Buddhists and Christians (as well as adherents of
three smaller religions) who illegally entered the country before 2014 from
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
The citizenship bill is “the first legal
articulation that India is, you might say, a homeland for Hindus,” said Pratap
Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s most prominent political scientists. Mehta believes
the measure violates the Indian constitution, which guarantees equal rights
before the law to all people within the country.
To name specific religious communities in the
law is “nothing else but sending a signal,” said Mehta. “The signal is that
Muslims are not on the same footing” as others in India.
Modi and his powerful second-in-command, Home
Affairs Minister Amit Shah, have said the measure is necessary to offer refuge
to persecuted religious minorities. Proponents say India owes a moral
responsibility to such communities who have faced severe hardship and even
violence. But the law does not provide any relief to members of oppressed
religious minorities — mostly Muslims — from other neighboring countries like
China and Myanmar.
The United States Commission on International
Religious Freedom described the legislation a “dangerous turn” that “runs
counter to India’s rich history of secular pluralism” in a statement Monday. It
called upon Congress and President Trump to consider sanctions against Shah if
the measure becomes law.
When the bill passed the lower house of
Parliament, Modi wrote that he was “delighted” by the step. The measure is “in
line with India’s centuries old ethos of assimilation and belief in
humanitarian values,” he said.
The heated debate in Parliament over the
citizenship measure repeatedly raked up India’s original trauma, the partition
of the subcontinent in 1947. While Pakistan was founded as a home for the
region’s Muslims, India defined itself in opposition to the idea that religion
was the basis of nationhood.
For some in India, the citizenship bill is a
sign of the profound changes sweeping the country and a cause for deep sadness.
Shah Alam Khan, 49, a doctor and columnist in Delhi, said that his
great-grandparents decided to stay in India at the time of partition, rather
than leave for Pakistan as many Muslims did, because they believed in India’s
pluralistic ethos. “They trusted the sky over their heads and the ground under
their feet,” he wrote. “I am happy they aren’t alive to see this collapsing
India.”
For India’s Muslim community — the
second-largest in the world — the Modi government’s recent moves have
intensified a sense of insecurity. Modi has long been a controversial figure
among Muslims. In 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he
failed to stop the deadliest outbreak of communal violence in recent Indian
history. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed over three days. A
court-appointed panel absolved Modi of involvement in the riots.
Now some Muslims worry that the current
citizenship measure is only the first step of a larger project. Shah, Modi’s
lieutenant, has repeatedly stated that the government intends to launch a
nationwide registry in which all Indians will be required to prove their
citizenship, patterned on the exercise recently carried out in Assam. The
opaque and complex process was riddled with errors and forced residents to
provide ancestral documents going back decades.
Shah’s repeated references to migrants as
“termites” and “infiltrators” who represent a security threat is coded language
to refer to Muslims, critics say. Despite Shah’s assurances to the contrary,
many Indian Muslims feel they would be the target of a nationwide citizenship
registry.
One of the effects of Modi’s new citizenship
measure would be to help those left off the list of citizens in Assam —
provided they are not Muslims. In September, Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of a powerful
Hindu nationalist organization that is the ideological parent of the ruling
party, reportedly assured politicians that “no Hindu” would be expelled from
the country.
“We have to distinguish between the
infiltrators and genuine persecuted refugees,” said Sudhanshu Trivedi, a
spokesman for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. “This is the right time for
India to assert its security concerns, because we are living with neighbors
which are the biggest security threats in the entire world.” He said the three
countries mentioned in the legislation — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan —
were “theocratic states.”
As the citizenship legislation moved closer
to passage, the furor around it has grown. Hundreds of prominent scientists and
scholars issued public letters to express their opposition.
In India’s northeast, violent protests broke
out against the measure, which some believe will bring demographic change.
States such as Assam have long witnessed tensions surrounding the arrival of
Bengali-speaking migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, who locals fear will
alter their culture. Now the citizenship measure will help non-Muslim migrants
to become citizens and settle outside of areas designated for indigenous
people.
“There is a lot of anger since we have already
absorbed so many people,” said Madhurjya Baruah, 32, a lawyer in Guhawati, the
capital of Assam. “After making everyone in the state prove their citizenship,
you are saying you will accept recent immigrants. Whatever religion they may
be, we are not going to accept it.”
If enacted, the citizenship measure is
certain to face a legal challenge to its constitutionality. But India’s Supreme
Court has demonstrated that it is reluctant to rule in an expeditious manner on
such challenges, particularly when they involve the policy priorities of the
government.
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