Citizen Amendment Act in India: A Democratically-sanctioned genocide underway?
My childhood in India was marked by vivid contrasts. Wearing a traditional kurti with ripped jeans, I used to accompany my Muslim friend to the mosque, where I ate seekh kebabs while she prayed inside. Every Diwali we would burst firecrackers together, and every Eid I would help her family adorn their home. Sitting on their roof I remember watching the traffic merge into the horizon, and engulfed by the clamour and noise from the street below I had found peace. Now that I am older, I reflect on this experience by paralleling it with India’s political discourse. Identity politics, primarily based on religion, has always been integral in the country born out of religious tension. It would be a rarity to find an Indian unfamiliar with the 2002 Gujarat riots or the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, but it was never my ground-level reality. Clouded in my privilege, I enjoyed communal harmony within the broader tensions spread out across the country. However, when my friend called me up a few days ago and expressed her fear of being a Muslim in India, a few questions started haunting me. Why did we get only a only day off for Eid but weeks for Christmas and Diwali? Why did we never talk about the Gawkadal massacre in Kashmir, or the lack of action taken against the police force who perpetrated it? Why did my mother fear what others would say when I wanted to get “solidarity” tattooed on my arm in Urdu? However, the idea of a truly secular India is not built on castles in the air. When Gandhi was shot for his secular beliefs by a Hindu nationalist, the entire nation grieved. The most popular president in Indian history remains a Muslim. Today the riots across the country are not carried out by anti-nationals, but largely by those who believe in the secular fabric of the country.
Image Source: © Reuters/Adnan Abidi
The protests across India today are dynamic. It is an amalgamation of built-up anger against the ruling government’s blatant Islamophobia, the crippling economy, police brutality along with a host of other factors. To understand the eruption of riots across India and how its key perpetrator - the Citizen Amendment Act or CAA - can amount to genocide, one must understand the ideology of BJP, the ruling party, and the construction of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).
In the 1950s, Hindu nationalism was a weak ideology, and BJP won only 2 seats in the parliament in its first election. Following this major blow, the party decided to forego positive secularism and Gandhian socialism by adopting hard-line “Hindutva” ideologies, and aligned itself further with its ideological parent RSS - a paramilitary nationalist organisation. By the 1990s, BJP’s then president L.K. Advani became the face of a movement to build a temple in the birth city of Hindu deity Ram over Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque, and this promise was included in BJP’s election manifesto as well. His attempts to mobilise volunteers for paying respects to Lord Ram at the mosque were stopped over fears of communal violence, and two years after this incident a mob demolished the mosque. This subsequently led to anti-Muslim riots, killing an estimated 2,000 people in the immediate aftermath. Over time, BJP became the dominant opposition to the Indian National Congress, and seized its growing unpopularity due to high inflation and corruption scandals by offering an alternative “party with a difference”. After Amit Shah became the party president, BJP developed further closer ties to RSS, with the latter exercising greater control within the party. Additionally, BJP enjoyed substantially higher finances due to rising donations. Unsurprisingly, the scale of BJP’s electoral propaganda, publicity expenditure and outreach programmes far outweighed those of the opposition. These factors led to the rise of the BJP-led NDA coalition in India, which has been dominating the national discourse in a way no other party has in recent times.
Image Source: © Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto/Getty Image
So what is the CAA, and how does it align with BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology? The Citizen Amendment Act, which is a revision of the Citizen Amendment Bill established in 1955, allows illegal migrants to acquire citizenship as long as they are Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist and Christian immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. They will be fast-tracked for citizenship in six years as long as they have entered India before 31st December 2014, with a requirement of 12 years of residency for naturalisation. In the previous bill, illegal migrants, regardless of their religion, could not acquire citizenship. The argument put forth by the government is that this act aims to provide shelter to persecuted religious minorities who have nowhere to go except India, as persecuted Muslims can seek refuge in the neighbouring Islamic countries. However, this logic has evident fallacies. Persecuted Muslim minorities exist in Islamic countries, such as Ahmadiyya and Balochs in Pakistan, and neighbouring non-Muslim countries have religious minorities facing extreme persecution as well. Examples include Rohingyas in Burma and Tamils in Sri Lanka, and these groups include Hindus and Christians as well. The government has so far failed to address this limitation. The deeper issue with this law lies in the fact that India’s foundations lie in its secularity. This law infringes those secular foundations as illegal migrants are being defined by their religion, which further excludes them from obtaining Indian citizenship.
The CAA is problematic in itself, but combined with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), has the potential to act as a sieve and filter out India’s Muslim minority by rendering them stateless. The NRC is essentially a list of Indian citizens, and if one is left out of the NRC they are required to present themselves at the Foreigner’s Tribunal with documents proving they are Indian, or that their parents or grandparents were Indians, to preserve their Indian citizenship. This is a difficult task in India where bureaucracy takes an extreme turn, millions of poor lack documentation, and spelling errors causing a mismatch of documents could put one at risk of becoming stateless. The CAA effectively acts as a shield for non-Muslims left out of the NRC, as they can claim to be persecuted religious minorities and get fast-tracked for citizenship. While the government has insisted these past few weeks that the NRC and CAA are not connected, the Home Minister Amit Shah has been recorded several times explicitly stating the two are connected, as the CAA would be chronologically followed by the implementation of a nationwide NRC to weed out “infiltrators”. This exercise has been implemented in the state of Assam, where 1.9 million were left out of the NRC. While this has been deemed erroneous by most political parties, BJP has considered a revision primarily because of one reason - too many Hindu Bengalis, who form the bulk of their voter base in the state, have been left out.
Image Source: © AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade
Despite this, some may believe amounting this exercise to a “genocide” is a tad bit too extreme. However compelling evidence presented by Dr Gregory Stanton, a renowned expert who created the “Ten Stages of Genocide” and founded the organisation Genocide Watch, is worrying. His research on genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia and Myanmar have shown that they neatly fit into these ten stages, and I will explain how CAA combined with the NRC creates the perfect atmosphere for all these ten stages to be completed. The first stage is “classification”, which divides people along ethnic, religious and racial lines. This stage was reached long ago, one can argue before the partition, as implicit Islamophobia and culture of “Hindus versus the rest” was prominent. The next stage is “symbolisation”, where the dominant group uses law and customs to identify minorities. The community one mingles with, the clothing one wears, the names of people and the meat they eat have been used for this purpose again, as many may argue, before India’s independence. The third stage is “discrimination”, which has been blatantly seen in the case of beef bans across the country and legal hurdles concerning interfaith marriages, which has further opened doors for hate crimes rising in the country. The fourth stage, “dehumanisation”, is again evident in fascist Hindu discourse comparing Muslim migrants to vermin and termites.
The fifth stage, and this is where BJP’s ideology and affiliations become important, is “organisation” - where militias and groups emboldened by government support enforce government ideologies and policies. BJP’s parent organisation, RSS, is a paramilitary organisation created to defend Hindu interests, draws inspiration from Nazi activities, and is affiliated with registered terrorist organisations accused of instigating mob violence, such as the Bajrang Dal. The sixth stage is “polarisation” where media and social fabrics are altered to polarise the society against targeted communities. BJP’s IT cell has been actively spreading misinformation concerning Muslims through a narrative of victimhood, which has further led to violence against the community - through streams such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. The seventh stage is “preparation”, which refers to official plans and actions to relocate a community, and the combination of CAA and NRC effectively filters out a list of people to be transferred to detention centres. Voter lists were used under Narendra Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister during the 2002 Gujarat riots to identify and lynch Muslims, so it is reasonable for one to assume the worst outcome at this stage. Stage eight is “persecution” which sees the escalation of violence. Since the NRC-CAA decision rolled out, protests across the country have been met with increasing police brutality, deaths, unlawful detention in prisons and confiscation of Muslim property.
The ninth stage is the extermination of the community and the tenth stage is the denial by the government, which would not come as a surprise considering the routine terrorisation of eyewitnesses to hate crimes, leading to the acquittal of criminals in the country. I believe that India is at the eighth stage.
Image Source: © Avinash Giri
This may be a distant, unlikely possibility. However, when confronted with the pattern taken by genocides across the world, and paralleling it with activities in India, a worrisome picture materialises. One must also ask why the government has chosen this time to implement this decision with such fervour, in light of protests taking place across the country. India’s economy is facing a historic slowdown, inflation and unemployment have peaked to unforeseen levels, IMF has credited India partly for the global slowdown, and the government has chosen precisely this time to conduct this expensive exercise. Is this a tactic to distract the mainstream population from the more pressing issues facing the country?
Nevertheless, the backlash faced by the government, which they evidently had not anticipated, has given me hope. The massive defeat of BJP in the recent elections held in the capital showed that their campaign, which focused on religious polarisation and demonisation of peaceful protesters, had little appeal. A Hindu university standing against police brutality in a Muslim university is a true reflection of what Indian society was always meant to be — compassionate and tolerant. A land with abundant Islamic influence, which gave birth to four major world religions, cannot afford to be anything but secular. When former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government resorted to autocracy in the 1970s, India emerged stronger with a conscious sense of what it meant to be democratic.
I hope that Indian society emerges stronger from this revolution against religious divides as well, with a conscious sense of what it means to be secular.
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