WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT INDIA’S NEW BILL
India’s lower House of Parliament (Lok Sabha) has passed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), which will grant citizenship to religious minorities from neighbouring countries, with legal experts saying it violates the country’s secular constitution.
The bill, which seeks to amend the 1955 citizenship law, aims to give citizenship to “persecuted” minorities - Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians - from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but excludes Muslims.
After being approved 311-80 by the lower chamber on Monday, the bill will now go to the upper House, where the ruling Hindu national- ist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lacks a majority.
Opposition parties say the bill is discriminatory as it singles out Muslims in an officially secular nation of 1.3 billion people. Muslims form nearly 15 per cent of the population.
Critics point out that the move is part of a Hindu supremacist agenda pushed by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since it came to power nearly six years ago.
‘Strategy to polarise India’
Sanjay Jha, spokesperson of the main opposition Congress party, told Al Jazeera that the CAB is “part of a deeper divisive BJP’s political strategy to polarise India”. “Hence the exclusionary element of religion in CAB,” he said. “The political business model of the BJP is to keep India on a permanent boil, raising the communal temperatures high during elections.”
Last month, Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, a close confidant of Modi, announced that the country will begin the exercise of counting all its citizens to weed out undocumented immigrants from neighbouring countries.
A similar exercise called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was carried out in the northeast state of Assam where nearly two million people were left off the citizens’ list in August.
Shah has in the past called Bangladeshi immigrants as “termites” and “infiltrators” and a threat to national security.
His party has vehemently opposed the arrival of Rohingya refugees and threatened to deport them to Myanmar despite the Muslim minority facing ethnic cleansing back home.
It also excludes Sri Lanka, where Tamil minorities have faced atrocities.