DEBATE ON CITIZENSHIP RAGES; PROTESTS ERUPT

Who is an Indian citizen and should they have to prove it with ancestry and government papers? These questions convulsed the nation in the closing months of 2019 and sparked massive demonstrations after the Centre pushed through a controversial amendment to India’s citizenship law. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act that was passed by Parliament in December fast-tracks the citizenship process for refuges of Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Jain and Buddhist faiths who entered India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh on or before December 31, 2014. The government says the act is aimed at helping persecuted minorities fleeing religious threats in three Muslim-majority countries. But a number of opposition parties – and more importantly, civil society groups, students, ordinary people, activists and artists – have staged fierce protests against the act, or CAA. Opponents of the CAA say the act is unconstitutional because it links faith to citizenship in a secular country and discriminatory because it leaves out Muslims. There is a second prong to this debate: the National Register of Citizens, or NRC, that was first implemented in Assam to identify illegal immigrants in 1951 and updated earlier this year in an exercise that left out 1.9 million people from the citizenship rolls. Activists allege if NRC and CAA are simultaneously implemented, it will ensure that the new act will act as a safety net for people from all faiths who are excluded from NRC, except Muslims.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has categorically said no discussion for a nationwide NRC had taken place. Opposition parties say this is a smokescreen and that the government is trying to get NRC done covertly through the National Population Register, a process of enumeration of Indians to be undertaken simultaneously with the 2021 census. Protests against the CAA first erupted in the north-east, where people fear the new law will open the floodgates for Hindu refugees, and led to the deaths of five protesters in Assam.

But the demonstrations quickly spread all over India. It reached deadly proportions in the span of 48 hours on December 20 and 21 in Uttar Pradesh, where violent clashes left at least 21 protesters dead.