View: Holes in the defence of the Citizenship Amendment Act

At his Ram Lila Grounds rally, kicking off BJP’s campaign for the Delhi assembly elections due early next year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put up a stout defence of the Citizenship Amendement Act and charged the Opposition with seeking to divide the country for its own vote bank politics. How can his government seek to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship, he asked, when his government has been implementing welfare scheme after welfare scheme without any attempt to discriminate against any class of beneficiaries?
How can the Opposition mislead people about a National Register of Citizens when neither the Cabinet nor Parliament has discussed any proposal to create an NRC? CAA merely seeks to grant citizenship to refugees of religious persecution in three neighbouring countries. How can anyone in their senses oppose such a move? From Gandhiji to Manmohan Singh, many leaders, including Rajasthan chief minister Gehlot, have raised such a demand. Opposition is motivated by hatred towards Modi and spreading lies.

These claims would have been a whole lot more credible if one, the Assam NRC had not happened and, two, home minister Amit Shah had not repeatedly affirmed his intention to implement a nationwide NRC, and three, the intent to give refuge had extended its benevolence to all neighboring countries and all denominations, instead of excluding Sri Lanka, Myanmar and China among countries and Muslims as a religious denomination.

The Assam NRC has excluded 19 lakh people from citizenship and detention centres are open for them, and already house quite a few. A big difference between the NRC as implemented in Assam and the method by which the Congress-led state government of Assam had sought to implement the Assam Accord is the onus of proof: under the NRC, an individual has to prove his/her citizenship, under the Illegal Migrants (Detection by Tribunal) process, which had been in place before NRC was instituted, the onus of proving any individual was not a citizen was on the state. The IMDT Act had been challenged by the current chief minister of Assam and BJP leader Sarbananda Sonowal and the Supreme Court struck it down in 2005.

If implementation of schemes till now has not differentiated between people on the basis of religion, does that guarantee that citizenship would not be challenged selectively? Unfortunately not. After all, in Assam also, implementation of schemes had presumably not discriminated against people on any basis. Yet, when NRC was done, Muslims have turned out to be more vulnerable. BJP politicians have said time and again that by enacting the Citizenship Amendment Bill, Hindus who have been left out of the list of citizens would be protected from externment. Why should this not be the case across the country as well, when NRC is carried out across the country?

Will the state government use CAA to separate Hindus from Muslims who have been determined by Assam’s NRC as non-citizens? Right now, the agitation in Assam prevents the government from doing this. But will the government give a public undertaking that CAA would not be used to distinguish between people on the basis of religion in the NRC-excluded in Assam?

And what is the rationale for excluding Muslim refugees from the ambit of the law, and China, the country from where the maximum number of refugees come to India, and Myanmar and Sri Lanka? Would Gandhiji have sought exclusion of Muslim refugees?

The answer is blowing in an ill wind, across the land.


Views expressed are author's own.