Playing with fire
The Citizenship Amendment Act, a new act passed by the Indian parliament last week, has sparked a storm of protest across India.
In this way, the India's fascist prime minister and his Hindutvainfused part are playing with fire by singling out India's Muslims and laying the groundwork for legal discrimination against them.
Under the law, non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh will now be put on the fast track to Indian citizenship if they face 'persecution' in their countries of origin. Coupled with this clearly prejudicial legislation is another, equally sinister scheme up the Modi regime's sleeve: the National Register of Citizens. This is basically a plan designed to make India's people prove their nationality, through documentary evidence or otherwise, or else be left off the citizenship rolls. This dubious experiment has already been tried in the state of Assam, and nearly 2m people have been stripped of their citizenship. As critics point out, this is a weapon - disguised in legal language - to permanently disenfranchise India's Muslims.
It is essential that the international community speaks up and censures India's blatantly anti-Muslim moves. The reactions to the moves have been intense. Protests on Monday entered their fifth day, with demonstrations in Delhi, along with several of India's metros. On Sunday, the police savagely smothered a demonstration by students in Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia university; footage doing the rounds on mainstream and social media shows Indian security men using brute force against protesting students. But it is not just India's Muslims that are up in arms over the BJP's moves. Hindus in Assam, for example, have taken to the streets as they fear the new citizenship law will open the floodgates for Bangladeshi Hindus to enter their state and alter the demographic balance. Protests have roiled other north-eastern states for similar reasons, and several people have reportedly been killed. Modi had called for calm on Monday, yet this appeal rings hollow as the Indian prime minister and his ideological comrades are primarily responsible for this mess.
While there have been muted condemnations from the US and others (a UN official called the CAA 'discriminatory') much more forceful criticism is required. The US, EU and India's trading partners - many of whom are self-proclaimed standard bearers of human rights - must openly condemn Delhi's Islamophobic behaviour. The proposed citizenship register has sent a chill through India's Muslim community, while there are credible reports that the central government is building a number of detention centres, apparently to house those whose nationality New Delhi cancels. Though claiming to be a secular democracy, India's rulers, many of them card-carrying RSS members, are actually aping the grim methodologies of the Third Reich. But is this surprising, considering that the leading lights of the Sangh Parivar were unabashed admirers of European fascism?