India police ban protests:
Subcontinent
Police detained several hundred protesters in some of India’s biggest cities Thursday as they defied bans on assembly that authorities imposed to stop widespread demonstrations against a new citizenship law that opponents say threatens the country’s secular democracy.
Protests raged around the country despite the bans as opposition widened to the law, which excludes Muslims. The legislation has sparked anger at what many see as the government’s push to bring India closer to a Hindu state.
Authorities erected road blocks and disrupted internet and phone services, including in parts of New Delhi, and tightened restrictions on protesters in the northeastern border state of Assam, which is where the protests first began last week. The new citizenship law applies to Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally but can demonstrate religious persecution in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims.
Critics say it’s the latest effort by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist-led government to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims, and a violation of the country’s secular constitution.
Modi has defended it as a humanitarian gesture. Rather than contain uprisings, the protest bans appear to be helping them spread – from Assam and a handful of university campuses and Muslim enclaves in the capital – to campuses and cities from coast to coast.
“I think what is wonderful is that young people all in their 20s have so vividly understood the game plan, which is to divide people,” said Zoya Hasan, a political scientist in New Delhi. “What people are saying is that you are going to divide, we are going to multiply.” (AP)