As Protests Rage on Citizenship Bill, Is India Becoming a Hindu Nation? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/world/asia/india-citizenship-protests.html
But Indian Muslims are feeling increasingly desperate, and so are progressives, many Indians of other faiths, and those who see a secular government as fundamental to India’s identity and its future.
The world is now weighing in, too. United Nations officials, American representatives, international advocacy groups and religious organizations have issued scathing statements saying that the citizenship law is blatantly discriminatory. Some are even calling for sanctions.
Critics are deeply worried that Mr. Modi is trying to wrench India away from its secular, democratic roots and turn this nation of 1.3 billion people into a religious state, a homeland for Hindus.
“They want a theocratic state,’’ said B.N. Srikrishna, a former judge on India’s Supreme Court. “This is pushing the country to the brink, to the brink of chaos.”
“This is how waves of communal violence start in the country,” he added.
Mr. Modi is no stranger to communal violence. The worst bloodshed that India has seen in recent years exploded on his watch, in 2002, in Gujarat, when he was the top official in the state and clashes between Hindus and Muslims killed more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims.
Mr. Modi was widely blamed for not doing enough to stop it. Courts have cleared him, but many people believe he was at least partly responsible for the brutality that unfolded.
His grip on power is still firm, even with a weakening economy. The political opposition, including the once-dominant Indian National Congress party, has been disorganized and shaky compared with the juggernaut he and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, the home minister, have built in their Bharatiya Janata Party.
But this contentious citizenship law, which paves a special path for non-Muslim migrants in India to become citizens, has galvanized the opposition. Rival opposition leaders who usually can’t agree on anything are planning protests together. Students from across the country are rallying to each other’s defense. Each episode of harsh police action captured by mobile phone and beamed around cyberspace catalyzes more sympathy, more protests — and more prospects for violence.
The new citizenship legislation, called the Citizenship Amendment Act, expedites Indian citizenship for migrants from some of India’s neighboring countries if they are Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee or Jain. Only one major religion in South Asia was left off: Islam.
Indian officials have denied any anti-Muslim bias and said the measure was intended purely to help persecuted minorities migrating from India’s predominantly Muslim neighbors — Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
The legislation follows hand in hand with a divisive citizenship test conducted this summer in one state in northern India and possibly soon to be expanded nationwide.
All residents of Assam, along the Bangladesh border, had to produce documentary proof that they or their ancestors lived in India since 1971. Around two million of Assam’s population of 33 million — a mix of Hindus and Muslims — failed to pass the test and now risk being rendered stateless. Huge new prisons are being built to house anyone determined to be an illegal immigrant.
A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both these measures — the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law — to strip away rights from Muslims who have been living in India for generations. The way this will happen, many Muslim Indians fear, is that they will be asked to produce old birth certificates or property deeds necessary to prove citizenship and they will be unable to do so. And while Hindu residents in the same situation will be given a pass, it seems, Muslim residents will not have the same legal protections.