India passes citizenship bill seen as targeted at Muslims
NEW DELHI — Lawmakers in India enacted a fundamental change to its citizenship law to include religion as a criterion for nationality for the first time, deepening concerns that a country founded on secular ideals is becoming a Hindu state that treats Muslims as second-class citizens.
The new law creates a path to citizenship for migrants who belong to several South Asian religions but pointedly excludes Islam, the faith practiced by 200 million Indian citizens.
The measure was approved by a majority of the upper house of India’s parliament in a final vote late Wednesday. Its passage marks the latest political victory for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a strident nationalist in the mold of other right-leaning populist politicians around the globe.
Since winning a landslide reelection victory in May, Modi has moved swiftly to implement his party’s agenda of emphasizing Hindu primacy in India, a diverse democracy home to more than 1.3 billion people.
Hindu nationalist ideologues view India’s history as a series of humiliations — centuries of rule by Muslim kings followed by British colonialism — that must be redressed.
They despise the secularism embraced by India’s founders, who sought to create a country where all faiths were treated equally. And they accuse India’s previous leaders of pandering to religious minorities, especially Muslims, in search of votes.
Now, in just months, Modi has achieved some of their top objectives. In August, he reversed seven decades of policy in Kashmir, stripping the Muslimmajority state of its autonomy and instituting a crackdown that endures to this day. Last month, India’s Supreme Court greenlighted the construction of a grand Hindu temple at the site of a 16th century mosque illegally razed by Hindu extremists in 1992.
The government has also engaged in increasingly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. The country’s powerful interior minister has called migrants who entered the country illegally “termites” and pledged to expel them. Earlier this year, Indian authorities completed a Byzantine process aimed at identifying migrants in the northeastern state of Assam. Nearly 1.9 million people were left off the final list of citizens, raising the risk that they could be rendered stateless or deported.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill, which was passed by both houses of parliament this week, is another priority. It is effectively an amnesty for all Hindus, Buddhists and Christians who illegally entered the country before 2014 from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
As the citizenship legislation moved closer to a final vote, the furor around it grew. In India’s northeast, violent protests broke out against the measure. In some areas, local authorities requested help from the Indian army, shut down mobile internet access and imposed curfews.
Opponents of the new citizenship law have vowed to challenge its constitutionality. But India’s Supreme Court has demonstrated that it is reluctant to rule in an expeditious manner on such challenges, particularly when they involve the policy priorities of the government.