Tue 10 December 2019:
India took a major step toward the official marginalization of Muslims on Tuesday as one house of Parliament passed a bill that would establish a religious test for migrants who want to become citizens, solidifying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda.
The bill passed in the lower house, the Lok Sabha, a few minutes after midnight, following a few hours of debate. The vote was 311 to 80. The measure now moves to the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where Mr. Modi seems to have enough allies that most analysts predict it will soon become law.
Muslim Indians are deeply unsettled. They see the new measure, called the Citizenship Amendment Bill, as the first step by the governing party to make second-class citizens of India’s 200 million Muslims, one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, and render many of them stateless.
Heading toward a fascist state
“We are heading toward totalitarianism, a fascist state,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim lawmaker, who on Monday dramatically tore up a copy of the bill while giving a speech in Parliament. “We are making India a theocratic country.”
Mr. Modi and his party are deeply rooted in an ideology that sees India as a Hindu nation. And since the B.J.P.’s landslide re-election win in May, Mr. Modi’s administration has celebrated one Hindu nationalist victory after another, each a demoralizing drumbeat for Muslims.
With the new citizenship bill, Mr. Modi’s party says it is simply trying to protect persecuted Hindus, Buddhists and Christians (and members of a few smaller religions) who migrate from predominantly Muslim countries such as Pakistan or Afghanistan.
But the legislation would also make it easier to incarcerate and deport Muslim residents, even those whose families have been in India for generations, if they cannot produce proof of citizenship.
Opposition Party
The leaders of the opposition Indian National Congress party are trying to paint the bill as a danger to India’s democracy. After India won its independence, its founding leaders, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru among them, made a clear decision: Even though the country was 80 percent Hindu, it would not be an officially Hindu nation. Minorities, especially Muslims, would be treated equally.
Rahul Gandhi, a party leader and great-grandson of Mr. Nehru, said, “India belongs to everybody — all communities, all religions, all cultures.” Shashi Tharoor, the party’s intellectual heavyweight, called the bill an “all-out assault on the very idea of India.”
But the Congress party is at a low point in its 100-year-plus history. And Mr. Modi’s party has the numbers: With allies, it controls nearly two-thirds of the seats in the lower house.
Read more here: Citizenship Amendment Bill: India’s new ‘anti-Muslim’ law causes uproar
Distract the public
Some of Mr. Modi’s critics believe the bill is serving to distract the public from another pressing issue: the economy. For the first time in decades, India’s economy is slowing significantly. It is still huge, but several big industries, like car and motorcycle manufacturing, have seen sales plummet like never before.
“The economy is in tatters,” said Aman Wadud, a human rights lawyer in Assam. The bill, he said, was “the only issue left to polarize the country and distract people.”
The citizenship bill is a piece of the campaign to identify and deport Muslims who have been living in India for years, critics of the bill say. It lays out a path to Indian citizenship for migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan if they can prove they have been in India for at least five years and ascribe to the specified religions.
Enormous network of prisons
The Indian government is already racing to build an enormous network of prisons to house thousands of migrants. If immigration law is applied selectively, Hindu migrants who are swept up in raids may be released and allowed to apply for citizenship, while Muslim migrants could instead be sent to detention camps, opponents say.
“In every state, Muslims are running around for papers,” said Mr. Wadud, the human rights lawyer in Assam. “An environment of fear has been created.”
excerpts from NYT
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