Citizen Amendment Bill: institutionalising division

So why leave out the persecuted communities of Ahmediyas, Sufis, Shias in Pakistan, or the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the Rohingyas in Myanmar?

If the BJP/RSS thinks it can re-write its own brand of xenophobic history using its brute majority in Parliament, then it is walking on thin ice. If it thinks that it has finally entered the historic phase of carving a supremacist ‘Hindu Rashtra’ by subverting both the pluralist, secular Indian Constitution and the established institutions of the largest democracy, then it is again treading on a sinister and diabolical path. Surely, you can’t have a secular democracy where there is “equality of law” outside all religion, caste, community, or status, as enshrined in Article 14 of the Indian Constitution drafted by Dr BR Ambedkar in post-Independence India, and yet be able to create the scaffoldings of an entrenched Hindutva State where hate politics and communal divides remain the standing principles of daily life, ideological moorings and ‘maximum governance’.

Surely, even the majority in Parliament cannot amend the ‘basic structure of the Constitution’ as stated so categorically in the famous Keshavananda Bharti case in the Supreme Court of India. Indeed, if Amit Shah and his hardline mentor in the ruling dispensation are so aware that they might find themselves on slippery ground in the highest court with the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB), then why are they pushing it with such earnest and overwhelming vehemence, outside all consensus, discussion or debate in the civil society, bulldozing the Opposition, and defying the basic ethics and principles of the Indian Constitution and the freedom movement in which the RSS and its leaders did not participate? What compelling reasons do they have to push this sharply communal bill down the throat of the country when most of the North-east states, Bengal and others are up in arms, and while the entire secular edifice is under serious threat. Thereby, this bill, if passed in both the houses, will mark a vicious paradigm shift which will completely transform the basic character of both the Indian State and its fragmented and unequal secular democracy whereby minorities will be profiled, ghettoised, isolated, sent to detention camps or forcibly deported, even while tacitly being declared as ‘second class citizens’ – as been the so successful ‘Gujarat model’ post the 2002 genocide of Muslims, widely reported and documented as ‘State-sponsored’.

a federal US Commission on International Religious Freedom has said that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill is a “dangerous turn in wrong direction” and sought American sanctions against Union Home Minister Amit Shah if the bill is passed by both houses of the Indian Parliament. In a statement, the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said that it was deeply troubled over the passage of the bill in Lok Sabha.

The perverse use of terms such as “termites” and “illegal infiltrators”, once used by the fascists in Germany branding the Jews during and before the Holocaust to mass-exterminate millions of them in concentration camps and gas chambers, without any evidence, has indeed proved to be in terrible bad taste, resurrecting both bad faith and sad memory replete with the mass tragedy and pain which have still not been reconciled in Germany and Europe. The final NRC results, after much mass phobia and deportation/detention threats to an entire community of Indian citizens, has proved how distasteful is the use of such perverse and sectarian metaphors, and how wrong it can turn out to be in the laboratory of evidence and truth. Of the almost 19 lakh people apparently found as alleged ‘non-citizens’ in Assam in the final tally of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a huge chunk of the population are Hindus, Bengali Hindus, Gorkhas, indigenous tribes like Boros and communities like the Rajbonghis — all non-Muslim residents of the state. So are they all “termites and illegal infiltrators”?

Besides, the CAB is brazenly discriminatory on grounds of religion leaving Muslims out, while giving quick and easy citizenship status to Hindus, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all three basically Islamic nations.  So why leave out the persecuted communities of Ahmediyas, Sufis, Shias and others in Pakistan, or the Tamils in Sri Lanka (including those who are refugees in India), and the Rohingyas in Myanmar? How can one refugee in condemnation and exile be different from another refugee in condemnation and exile when it comes to be a magnanimous offer of shelter and dignity in another country? Surely, Angela Merkel has done no such discriminatory thing in Germany when giving shelter to 1 million refugees from Syria and the Middle-East, despite great opposition from anti-immigrant Right-wingers and aggressive Neo-Nazis.

Surely, you can’t have a secular democracy where there is “equality of law” outside all religion, caste, community, or status, as enshrined in Article 14 of the Indian Constitution drafted by Dr BR Ambedkar in post-Independence India, and yet be able to create the scaffoldings of an entrenched Hindutva State where hate politics and communal divides remain the standing principles of daily life, ideological moorings and ‘maximum governance’

Undoubtedly, the entire enterprise is neither based on principles of humanity nor is it great generosity on the part of the ruling regime in Delhi. It is precisely meant to polarize and divide society, pitch one community against another, including the minorities, and thereby create a vicious domain of mass insecurity, collective distrust and phobia, and irreparable social fissures which might give the BJP electoral benefits, but which will finally and inevitably rip apart the social edifice of Indian secular democracy sustained for so many decades with great difficulty and against all odds by visionaries of the freedom movement and those who followed them. Meanwhile, a federal US Commission on International Religious Freedom has said that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill is a “dangerous turn in wrong direction” and sought American sanctions against Union Home Minister Amit Shah if the bill is passed by both houses of the Indian Parliament.

In a statement, the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said that it was deeply troubled over the passage of the bill in Lok Sabha. Indeed, the massive and relentless protests and bandhs in Assam in the Northeast, and the defeat of BJP candidates in the bye-elections in Bengal where they fought with NRC as an agenda, are pointers that India is walking on a precarious and dangerous edge. It will be worthwhile for the home minister and the prime minister to reconsider their adamant position, send the bill to the standing committee in Parliament, or any other consensual body, bring in a process of consultation and consensus with opposition parties and, academic, political, legal and civil society representatives, take into account the views of state assemblies and others, and then only go for a truly democratic, federal, humanitarian and secular bill on future citizenship to refugees. Perhaps, for a change, the prime minister can make a call to Angela Merkel. She will surely give him good advice.