The measure would give migrants of all of South Asia’s major religions a clear path to Indian citizenship — except Islam. It is the most significant move yet to profoundly alter India’s secular nature enshrined by its founding leaders when the country gained independence in 1947.
The bill passed in the lower house, the Lok Sabha, a few minutes after midnight, following a few hours of debate. The vote was 311-80. The measure now moves to the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where 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.
“We are heading toward totalitarianism, a fascist state,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim lawmaker, who Monday dramatically tore up a copy of the bill while giving a speech in Parliament. “We are making India a theocratic country.”
Now, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, is hoping to expand that kind of citizenship test to other states. And the new legislation would become a guiding principle for who could hope to call themselves Indians.
Modi and his party are deeply rooted in an ideology that sees India as a Hindu nation. And since the BJP’s landslide reelection win in May, Modi’s administration has celebrated one Hindu nationalist victory after another, each a demoralising drumbeat for Muslims.
First came the Assam citizenship tests. Then Modi stripped away autonomy and statehood for Kashmir, which used to be India’s only Muslim-majority state. And last month, Hindu fundamentalists scored a big court victory allowing them to build a new temple over the ruins of a demolished mosque in the flashpoint city of Ayodhya.
With the new citizenship bill, 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.
Under Modi’s leadership, anti-Muslim sentiment has become blatantly more mainstream and public. Intimidation and attacks against Muslim communities have increased in recent years. And overt displays of Hindu piety and nationalism have become central in pop culture and politics.
Modi’s fellow lawmakers in the BJP are unapologetic about their pro-Hindu position.
When asked if he was trying to turn India into a Hindu nation, he laughed. “India has always been a Hindu nation,” he said. “The Muslims also are Hindus.” (This is a common Hindu nationalist belief: that India’s Muslims are relatively recent converts, even though Islam arrived in India hundreds of years ago.)
Even before lawmakers in the Lok Sabha voted, protests were breaking out.
In Assam, where the citizenship program began last summer, thousands of people have marched in the streets, hoisting placards and torches and shouting out their opposition to the bill.
People are talking of mass fasts and boycotts of schools and markets. On Monday, some hanged effigies of Modi and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, the home minister.
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 Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru among them, made a clear decision: Even though the country was 80% 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 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 Modi’s party has the numbers: With allies, it controls nearly two-thirds of the seats in the lower house.
Some of 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.
But forging India into an overtly Hindu nation has been a core goal of Modi’s party and of the RSS, a right-wing volunteer group whose ranks Modi rose up through and which provides him a backbone of support. And India’s recent moves in Kashmir, along with the Ayodhya temple ruling and the Assam citizenship tests, have been hugely popular with the prime minister’s base.
Earlier this year, Modi’s government tried to push similar citizenship legislation. The bill sailed through the lower house but stalled after many politicians in Assam said they did not like the religious dimension the BJP was injecting — or the possibility that a large number of Hindu Bengalis would be made citizens and would be able to legally acquire land in Assam.
The bill gathered new momentum this fall, after the citizenship test in Assam. Assam has witnessed waves of migration over the years, and many of those people whose citizenship was being questioned were migrants, both Hindus and Muslims, from neighbouring Bangladesh.
Shah, the home minister and architect of the BJP’s recent political victories, promised to protect the Hindus and other non-Muslims. He has called illegal migrants from Bangladesh “termites,” and along with his other statements made clear that Muslims were his target. Shah has also promised to impose the citizenship test from Assam on the entire country.
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.
To overcome the resistance from politicians in Assam, who do not want Hindu or Muslim migrants taking their land, the new version of the bill carves out special protections for areas predominated by indigenous people.
Modi’s supporters employ a certain logic when defending the bill’s exclusion of Muslims. They say Muslims are not persecuted in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, which is mostly true. They also say that when India and Pakistan were granted independence in 1947, the British carved out Pakistan as a haven for Muslims, while India remained predominantly Hindu. To them, the extension of that process is to ask illegal Muslims migrants to leave India and seek refuge in neighbouring, mainly Muslim nations.
Article 25 of the Indian Constitution says, “All persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.” Given that, many opponents of the bill say the citizenship legislation is patently unconstitutional. But the Hindu nationalists have an answer for that, as well.
“We are not talking about citizens,” said Ramesh Shinde, a spokesman for the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, a Hindu organisation that is considered a far-right group. “We are talking about migrants.”
Both sides agree on one thing: The bill could have far-reaching consequences.
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 Wadud, the human rights lawyer in Assam. “An environment of fear has been created.”
Kishan, the action hero turned politician, said he would next push to change India’s name to Bharat, the traditional Hindi word for India. But he said that he was not anti-Muslim, and that Muslims living in India legally had nothing to fear.
“How can I be anti-Muslim? My staff in Mumbai is Muslim,” he said.
“Hindus and Muslims in India are like this,” he said, interlacing his fingers. “But,” he added with a big smile, “I love Hindus.”
© 2019 New York Times News Service