The recent Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed into law on 11 December 2019, which is supposedly a means of legalizing immigrants and refugees from three specific border countries who arrived in India before 2014, is feared and despised for several reasons.
The countries involved are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Other border countries (China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) aren’t considered.
One reason Indians are upset with the CAA is that like Trump’s Muslim ban, the CAA unconstitutionally excludes Muslims. But there are other reasons that are equally important.
Like any country settled by waves of migration, India has its history to thank for huge numbers of displaced people resettling themselves. That history includes the 1947 Partition that accompanied Independence, wars, and economic and climate crises (along with a generous attitude towards refugees). Some of my favorite haunts in the Delhi of today and yesterday are areas resettled by refugees from one place or another.
The CAA is closely linked to the National Register of Citizens (NRC). While every country needs to document its citizens, the NRC is likely to exclude untold millions of people in India from citizenship. Many rural people in India, even those who came long before Independence, happen to be poor and unlettered and lack citizenship documents. The exclusions will include people of any religious persuasion who may have lived in India for a while, even for generations, but who lack the appropriate legacy documents proving where they, their fathers or even their grandfathers came from.
The NRC has already been implemented in the border state of Assam, where two million people were excluded from the NRC register. The fact that most of the ones excluded were Hindus proved to be a huge setback for the government’s Hindu-nationalist agenda and caused unnecessary suffering for the two million involved. Now the NRC is to be implemented nation-wide. It will be a nightmare for most people to prove that they are citizens of India.
The CAA aims to guarantee that only the non-Muslim subset of people who came from the three countries will be given a path to citizenship and thereby registered as citizens in the NRC. As a result, the Muslims among these millions will all be declared stateless and deprived of their right to vote, etc., and may be interned indefinitely or even expelled from the country.
These are only predictions, but the reason people are worried that they will come true is that they are in line with the threats issued by the ruling party and its openly-fascist parent organization the RSS. As I documented in an earlier Medium article, the RSS lives and breathes Islamophobia, playing to the world-wide nationalist trope of a pristine majority being swamped by barbaric minorities. The Home Minister Amit Shah, the most powerful politician in India today, who has long been suspected of involvement in extra-judicial killings, has repeatedly declared Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh to be ‘termites’ who deserve to be drowned in the Bay of Bengal.
No wonder people from all sections of society, religious and secular alike, urban and rural, students and intellectuals as well as ordinary working people, the old and the young, are demonstrating en masse against these laws, which come on top of a whole series of recent, similarly Hindu-nationalistic laws. In response, the government has tried to selectively impose a blackout on internet and mobile phone service, as has been done in Kashmir.
The government has also selectively invoked Section 144, a colonial-era law (from 1861) that forbids the assembly of more than four individuals in an area. Large numbers of people have been arrested under this law, though most have been released after a few hours. It is ironic that the same law used to arrest Mahatma Gandhi, who among other contributions won India independence through peaceful protest, is being used to arrest people today, including the country’s most prominent historian of Gandhi.
The very core of India’s identity is being seriously challenged these days, but it is reassuring to see the upwelling of non-violent protest and outrage.