[The Citizenship Amendment Act was approved by India’s Parliament on Dec. 11 and makes religion a criterion for nationality in India’s citizenship law for the first time. It creates an expedited path to citizenship for migrants from three countries — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — who illegally entered India by 2014, provided they belong to six religions. The religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism. Notably absent from the list: Islam, the religion practiced by about 200 million of India’s more than 1.3 billion people.]
By Joanna
Slater
 |
|
Demonstrators
burn an effigy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a protest of
the citizenship
law, outside Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi
on
Monday. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)
|
NEW
DELHI — The passage of
India's new citizenship law has sparked protests nationwide this week in a
major display of opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A coalition of
civil society organizations has planned protests in 20 cities Thursday, but authorities
in Delhi denied permission for the demonstration.
Here's what you need to know about the
legislation roiling the world's largest democracy.
What
is India’s new citizenship law?
The Citizenship Amendment Act was approved by
India’s Parliament on Dec. 11 and makes religion a criterion for nationality in
India’s citizenship law for the first time. It creates an expedited path to
citizenship for migrants from three countries — Pakistan, Bangladesh and
Afghanistan — who illegally entered India by 2014, provided they belong to six
religions. The religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism
and Zoroastrianism. Notably absent from the list: Islam, the religion practiced
by about 200 million of India’s more than 1.3 billion people.
Why
is the law controversial?
The law has sparked backlash on several
levels. When India became independent in 1947, its founders sought to create a
secular nation where all religions were welcome — in contrast with Pakistan,
which was conceived as a home for the subcontinent’s Muslims. By giving
preference to certain religions in citizenship law, the government is moving
away from that ethos.
The measure is “the first legal articulation
that India is, you might say, a homeland for Hindus,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one
of India’s most prominent political scientists, told The Washington Post.
The law has deepened worries that Modi, who
leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is pursuing policies that
effectively turn India’s Muslims into second-class citizens. In August, the
prime minister stripped India’s only Muslim-majority state — Jammu and Kashmir
— of its autonomy and statehood, reversing seven decades of policy. In
November, India’s Supreme Court allowed the construction of a grand Hindu
temple at the site of a 16th-century mosque illegally destroyed by Hindu
extremists.
While some critics of the citizenship law
view it as discriminatory and counter to India’s founding principles, for
others the opposition to the measure is rooted in different concerns. In
India’s northeast — a collection of seven states bordering Bangladesh, China
and Myanmar — there are long-standing tensions over migrants entering the
region. Residents there worry that the law makes it easier for migrants to
become citizens, hastening demographic and linguistic change.
Why
does the government say the law is necessary?
The Modi government says the law is a
humanitarian measure aimed at helping persecuted religious minorities from
three neighboring countries who have entered India. Such communities have faced
hardship and, at times, violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh — all
Muslim-majority nations — and the government says India has a moral
responsibility to help them.
Opponents say there are several problems with
the government’s logic. The first is that the law applies only to migrants who
entered India by 2014 and does not help religious minorities living in those
countries. The second is that the government has restricted its concern to
religious minorities, not members of other types of persecuted communities.
Experts say the government could have achieved its stated goal without using
language that explicitly excludes Islam.
What
has been the reaction so far?
International observers have expressed
serious concerns about the measure. The U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom said the legislation marked a “dangerous turn” and called upon Congress
and President Trump to consider sanctions against Amit Shah, Modi’s powerful
minister of home affairs. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said the
law was “fundamentally discriminatory” and appears “to undermine the commitment
to equality before the law enshrined in India’s constitution.”
In India, the furor shows little sign of
ebbing. Days of protests broke out in India’s northeast following the passage
of the measure, particularly in Assam, where four people were shot and killed
by police. Protests have also taken place in cities and at universities across
the country, including in the capital New Delhi, where police stormed the
campus of Jamia Millia Islamia University late Sunday. A fresh round of
demonstrations broke out this week in response to the actions of the police.
Protests also spread beyond India, with
demonstrations taking place in the United States and Britain. More than 10,000
academics issued a statement condemning police brutality against students and
calling the citizenship law “discriminatory and unjust.”
What
happens next?
Opponents of the measure are preparing to
challenge its legality in India’s Supreme Court, but a verdict in the case
could take months or longer.
Shah, Modi’s second-in-command, has described
the citizenship measure as a first step. The next priority is to implement a
nationwide register of citizens in which all Indians could be required to
provide documents proving their citizenship. The exercise would be modeled on a
registry carried out in Assam, a byzantine process that threatens to leave 2
million people stateless.
Shah says no Indian citizen has anything to
fear from a nationwide register of citizens that aims to weed out illegal
“infiltrators.” (He has also called such migrants “termites.”) But many Indian
Muslims are afraid the exercise is an excuse to target their claims to citizenship
— and some have begun to assemble their ancestral documents ahead of a possible
registry.
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