India’s anti-Muslim citizenship law sad, not surprising

As the world’s biggest democracy, India has long aspired to pluralism and secularism.

Every vote was to be counted; no faith was to be counted out.

Now, on the eve of national elections, India is changing that equation of equality for all.

India’s total population of 1.4 billion continues to grow — recently overtaking China’s. But it is not looking for more Muslims.

At last count, the country had more than 200 million Muslims — the third-largest number on Earth. Going forward, however, only nonMuslim migrants will qualify for new citizenship. Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsi, Jain or Christian refugee claimants from neighbouring countries are gaining a privileged pathway to Indian passports, thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nationalist government. Muslim migrants need not — cannot — apply upon arrival.

India’s existing Muslim population will still be able to cast ballots in India’s perennial festival of democracy over the next few weeks. But the second-class status of Islam has now been enshrined in law, while the front-runner status of Modi’s Hindu-centric coalition is being cemented in the coming campaign.

This is not the first time Modi’s BJP-led coalition has driven a wedge within Indian society. Emboldened by his increased popularity, he has promoted an agenda of Hindu hegemony known as Hindutva — or Hinduization — culminating with the discriminatory refugee law that has sparked a political furor about the degradation of democracy.

I’ve written before about the “saffronization” of India, which is a departure from the path of secularism adopted at the time of Partition in 1947. Back then, Pakistan was carved out of the old British colonial-era subcontinent as the selfdeclared homeland for many (but not all) Muslims, while India opted for pluralism as the home for people of all faiths.

Secularism was also enshrined in the constitution as a counterpoint to communalism — the legacy of deadly riots by rival religious mobs. Yet all these decades later, Modi’s right-wing chauvinist government has tapped into a populist, atavist impulse that aims to restore the historical dominance of Hinduism and its predominance in educational and cultural spheres.

All of that said, it is impossible to ignore the distinctive vocabulary that is being invoked by Modi to legitimize his march back in time: “Decolonization” is a word embraced around the world — not least by Muslims calling out “Orientalism” — but it is also a watchword for the Hindutva movement that aims to reduce Islamic influences embedded in India.

Modi’s BJP followers (and their historical antecedents) argue they are not merely throwing off the yoke of British colonial rule, which retreated in 1947. No, his supporters insist they are uprooting — decolonizing — a more enduring form of historical domination by India’s Moghul conquerors who imported Islam centuries ago, long before the British era.

That is one of the complications of the decolonization paradigm — the push for purification can easily go further back in time. People can keep peeling back layers of colonization and conquest until they reach their target, which is why Modi’s Hinduization movement is less concerned with the idea of white supremacy than Islamic hegemony.

There’s yet another conceptual challenge for Hindutva’s critics (of which I am one). India is far from alone in embracing religiosity or ethnicity as the measure of who shall qualify for citizenship or be disqualified, who will be welcomed with open arms or herded into closed camps.

Israel is increasingly criticized for religious discrimination for granting automatic sanctuary to Jewish immigrants under its Law of Return, enacted after its founding in 1948 (in the post-Holocaust era when Jews still faced pogroms in parts of Eastern Europe and persecution much of the Middle East). That Israel, as a Jewish state, privileges Jews is one of the reasons many critics claim “Zionism is racism.”

Yet it is a curious double standard.

For India is only the latest in a long line of countries that prioritize religion in a way that Canadians — who welcome people of all faiths — perhaps cannot fathom.

Religion has been the raison d’être of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Lebanon has kept its Palestinian refugees in camps since they fled their homes in 1948, long restricting their permitted occupations lest an influx of Sunni Muslims alter the country’s delicate religious balance — or compete for coveted jobs (after protests, those restrictions were partly eased in recent years).

Bhutan, a little-known kingdom nestled in the Himalayas along India’s northern border, has long been seen as a Buddhist paradise despite its mistreatment of Hindu refugees fleeing strife in neighbouring Nepal (shunting them into camps for years without letting them settle, for fear of changing the kingdom’s ethnic makeup). Germany has long recognized ethnicity for citizenship, regardless of place of birth — granting automatic status to those with German blood who “resettle” in Deutschland.

Against that backdrop, India’s new discriminatory citizenship law is surely disappointing, but hardly surprising — and assuredly not unique. It merely reminds us of the complexity of ethnic identity and religious rivalry around the world — and how historical grievances are so easily transformed into political grudges and legal cudgels.

Modi’s BJP followers argue they are not merely throwing off the yoke of British colonial rule, which retreated in 1947, but a more enduring form of historical domination by India’s Moghul conquerors who imported Islam centuries ago