WCHICKEN AMIT SHAH, The Indian Minister of the Interior, proposed his bill to Parliament on December 9, he presented it as an act of mercy. Now, he promised, people who fled persecution in neighboring countries and took refuge in India would have faster access to citizenship. His Citizenship (Amendment) Bill would correct the historic wrong of the partition of India in 1947 when – as he dishonestly said – the rival Congress party agreed to divide the country on bases nuns.
The bill was passed by hand in the Lok Sabha or lower house of parliament, where Mr. Shah’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has absolute power. But India has not welcomed its changes to the citizenship rules. In the northeastern states of Assam and Tripura, violent protests resulted in a curfew, the suspension of internet and rail services, and the deployment of army units. Hundreds of prominent intellectuals signed an angry petition, while in the upper house of parliament, speaker after speaker rose to castigate the bill, calling it an attack on the constitution of the India, or against its national soul, which would make the country like Nazi Germany or, worse, Pakistan. When the bill was passed on December 11, it was only by a majority of 21 votes in the 245-seat house.
For most participants, the cause of all this passion was not the few words that Mr. Shah added to India’s 1955 citizenship law. These are the ones he left out. The new law only applies to immigrants from three countries, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. And although it specifically accepts adherents of six religions, it does not include Muslims.
This is problematic for several reasons. By injecting religious references into considerations of citizenship, he subtly challenges the secularism enshrined in the Indian constitution. Opponents of BJP see this as a deliberate tactic towards the Hindu-nationalist goal of redefining India as a Hindu state, reducing the Muslim community 200 meters old and 14 centuries strong to a tenuous and dependent status. In rejecting proposed amendments that would have broadened the scope of the bill to include people of all religions, from more neighboring countries, Mr. Shah made it clear that the intention is indeed to make India a refuge mainly for Hindus (the other religions mentioned in the law together make up to 5% of the population of India), while rejecting the Rohingyas of Myanmar, the Uighurs of China or the members of the Ahmadi sect who is considered a heretic in Pakistan.
In parliament, Mr. Shah vigorously denied that his bill was discriminatory. On the campaign trail, however, it sounded different. Speaking this month in Jharkhand, a rural state where voting for the local assembly is underway, he ridiculed the concerns expressed by Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi. “Rahul baba said not to kick them out [Muslim migrants]», He laughed. “What are they, your chachere bhai, your cousins? I assure you that before the national elections of 2024, I will eliminate them all. “
Like the changes to the Citizenship Act, this promise is part of the BJPElection manifesto since Shah’s boss Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India in 2014. Before being deported, illegal immigrants must first be identified. One Indian state, Assam, has undertaken such an exercise for the past four years. Responding to decades of turmoil by indigenous Assamese, who fear being overwhelmed by Bengali-speaking intruders, the state has forced its 33 million inhabitants to produce documents establishing their long-term residence in India.
Completed in August, this national registry of citizens excluded some 1.9 million residents as “non-Indians”, who must submit to special courts to appeal their status. To the chagrin of Hindu chauvinists, it turned out that two-thirds of these conspicuous illegals were in fact Hindus; the claim that millions of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh had “invaded” Assam has proven to be a myth.
Despite this shortcoming, and despite the fact that compiling the Assam list has been costly and time-consuming for the government – not to mention a bureaucratic, legal and logistical nightmare for citizens – Mr. Shah wants to expand the project at national scale. Assuming a cost proportional to what Assam spent, this would require at least $ 7 billion. This does not include the costs of building detention centers, such as the growing archipelago of Assam prison camps, to house thousands of people deemed stateless and deprived of their rights.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act can save some of that money. Since the new law speeds up the path to Indian citizenship for everyone else, it is mainly Muslims who must be sorted by the national citizen registry. The news of this danger is already spreading. The mosque’s sermons warn the faithful to collect as many official documents as possible to serve the bloodhounds expected from Mr. Shah.
If this is the case, the countdown continues. Constitutional lawyers say the inclusion of a faith test for citizenship contradicts up to three articles of the country’s eloquently secular constitution. The Muslim League of the Indian Union has already appealed the law to the Supreme Court. Many lawyers also argue that compelling people to produce documentary evidence of their right to be called citizens violates the principle of the presumption of innocence.
It could also be that popular resistance does not die out. Secular activists, as well as Muslims, speak of refusal en masse to comply with any request for the presentation of citizenship documents. In Assam and other remote, ethnically complex, and historically violent states of India in the northeast of the country, citizenship rules are unpopular because native Assamese speakers and many tribal groups fear being outnumbered in their own state by other religion Indians. To allay these concerns, Shah has exempted much of the region from the new rules, even granting a state, Manipur, an archaic status, dating from the time of the Raj, which obliges visitors from other regions to India to obtain visit permits.
Ironically, this type of exclusionary arrangement is precisely what Mr. Modi proclaimed was ending, when in August his government deprived India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, of its semi-autonomous status. Four months later, the turbulent Kashmir valley, the most populous part of the old state, remains locked up under an Internet ban, its political leaders arrested.
In Parliament, Mr. Shah described the situation in Kashmir in laudatory terms as peaceful and normal. Perhaps he did not notice that by transforming citizenship into an issue in which you were born, his government undermined India’s strongest claim to legitimize the disputed territory: that at At the time of the partition, its people preferred the broad secular democracy of India to the restrictive Muslim uniformity of the other asylum seeker of Kashmir, Pakistan.■
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the title “A slap for Muslims”