India’s Citizenship Amendment Act 2019

A Hindu Rashtra in the making?

Abdul Rasool Syed

Passage of the contentious bill titled “Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019” (CAB) by the Indian parliament has sparked violent protests throughout India. The bill as well as the intention behind has attracted scathing stricture from the people from all walks of life. It has, undoubtedly, shaken the very foundation of the Indian constitution and sounds a death knell to the democratic and secular identity of the ‘world’s largest democracy’.

Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019—now an Act—has attracted strong opposition because it is discriminatory; exclusively towards Muslims. “Not only is the Bill discriminatory, it wreaks havoc on the very foundations of our Constitution,” Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said in the Lok Sabha. He added: “This is a step towards forming a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ as imagined by the RSS and BJP.”

India’s Citizenship Act of 1955 bars illegal migrants from acquiring Indian citizenship. An illegal migrant is a foreigner who enters the country without valid travel documents, e.g. passport and visa, or enters with valid documents but stays beyond the permitted time period. However, the “Citizenship Amendment Bill” of 2019 has introduced the following changes in the Citizenship Act of 1955.

1. It aims to provide citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. A person belonging to these faiths who came to India on or before December 31, 2014 can apply for citizenship.
2. With the CAB now a law, any legal proceedings pending against an ‘eligible’ illegal immigrant stand ‘abated’. They cannot be barred from applying for citizenship on grounds that proceedings are pending against them.
3. Though the act of applying for citizenship under this provision indicates the person entered India illegally, (s)he will not be deprived of rights/ privileges enjoyed till then.
4. Applicants who qualify are eligible for citizenship by naturalization if they can establish residency in India for five years, instead of the current 11 years.
5. The new provision will not apply to the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram or Tripura, as included in the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution, and states with the Inner Line Permit (ILP) provision. In effect, the Act excludes Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, almost the whole of Meghalaya, and parts of Assam and Tripura.
6. Presently, there is no specific provision to cancel the registration of an Overseas Citizen of India cardholder who violates provisions of the Act or any other law. The new Act empowers the Centre to do so.
7. Overseas Citizen of India cardholders will be given sufficient opportunity to argue their case before any decision to cancel their registration is taken.

The law in question has trigged a hot debate among constitutional luminaries, politicos and academicians since it has severely impinged on the ever-cherished democratic and secular fabric of the country.

To this end, On December 11, just before the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) was cleared, over 700 activists, academicians and filmmakers wrote a letter to the Indian government wherein they expressed grave concern over the two laws. “For the first time, there is a statutory attempt to not just privilege peoples from some faiths but at the same time relegates another, Muslims, to second–rate status,” they wrote, adding that “The new law, also went against the tenets of the Indian constitution. The CAB is at odds with the constitutional secular principles and a violation of Articles 13, 14,15,16 and 21 which guarantee the right to  equality, equality before law and non-discriminatory treatment by the Indian state.”

The major criticism of the law has been that it prevents Muslims from seeking citizenship, something similar to US President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban under which Muslims from some countries were banned from seeking asylum in the United States.

Legal experts argue that the CAB violates Article 14 of the Indian constitution which guarantees to them the right to equality. Faizan Mustafa, a constitutional luminary and the chancellor of Nalsar University in Law, while commenting on CAB, has termed the legislation “very aggressive” and ‘a violation of the Indian constitution’.

“We don’t have our citizenship based on religion. Our constitution prohibits   any discrimination based on religion. By distinguishing illegal immigrants based on religion, the proposed law violates the basic structure of the Indian constitution.” He said.

He added that if the government, through this bill, wants to give citizenship to the persecuted minorities in the neighbouring countries, how can it exclude the Rohingya of Myanmar who are far more persecuted than any other group in the neighbourhood.

Social scientists and experts working on refugee settlement are unconvinced about these arguments and have condemned the bill. “The CAB not only breaches the equality provisions of the Indian Constitution, it also runs afoul of secularism as a basic structure of the Constitution,” says Surya Deva, associate professor, School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, and an advisor to the UN Human Rights Council.

In addition, Snajhay Jha, a spokesperson of the main opposition Congress party termed the draconian law as Modi’s strategy to polarize India. He argued that the law is “part of a deeper divisive BJP’s political strategy to polarize India … Hence the exclusionary element of religion in the Citizenship Amendment Bill “The political business model of the BJP is to keep India on a permanent boil, raising the communal temperatures high during elections,” he added.

Last month, home minister Amit Shah, a close confidant of Narendra Modi, announced that the country will begin the exercise of counting all its citizens to weed out undocumented immigrants from neighbouring countries. A similar exercise called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was carried out in August in the northeast state of Assam where nearly two million people were left off the citizens’ list. Mr Shah has, in the past, called Bangladeshi immigrants as “termites” and “infiltrators” and a threat to national security. His party vehemently opposed the arrival of Rohingya refugees and threatened to deport them to Myanmar despite the fact that this persecuted Muslim minority was subjected to ethnic cleansing back at home. The draft law also excludes Sri Lanka where Tamil minorities have faced atrocities.

The BJP has both ideological and electoral compulsions to enact CAB. The RSS and BJP have long made public their commitment to give citizenship to Hindu immigrants. It was part and parcel of their campaigns for 2014 and 2019 elections. However, the short-term objective seems to be winning over the Hindu ‘refugee voters’ in West Bengal who exist in substantial numbers in nearly 70 of the state’s 294 assembly segments.

Additionally, Assam, which shares a border with Bangladesh, people fear an ethnic, demographic shift due to influx of immigrants-regardless of their religion. Citizens, in Assam, are also concerned about the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC), which requires people to produce documents for ancestry to be enlisted as Indian citizens.

This exercise, undertaken by PM Modi’s government in Assam between February 2015 and August this year, was meant to “throw out infiltrators”.

The final list of citizens, published on August 31, excluded nearly 1.9 million residents of Assam.

To encapsulate, let me quote a famous Indian author Arundhati Roy who while commenting on the CAB remarked “It will break the back of our constitution and cut the ground from under our feet”.  Therefore, it is advisable for Modi’s government that it should repeal this discriminatory Act (CAB) as soon as possible in order to save the country from further polarization and thereby restore the country’s lost image of being a secular and democratic. Erection of “Hindu Rashtra” is an elusive dream of Modi and his ideologues which can only be built on the graves of millions of innocent people.