India’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for immigrants from three neighbouring south Asian countries, as long as they aren’t Muslim.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed the lower house – the Lok Sabha – late on Tuesday, and last night the upper house – the Rajya Sabha – approved the bill in a 125-to-105 vote. Now it heads to the president’s desk, where it is expected to receive his signature in the coming days.
The sweeping change to India’s 64-year-old immigration laws offers undocumented immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan an effective amnesty. People fleeing these countries will no longer be deported or imprisoned, and can apply for citizenship, but only if they are members of a religious minority.
As each of those are Muslim majority countries, the bill applies to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Parsees – but not to Muslims.
India’s governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is seeking to paint the legislation as nothing more than a positive, benevolent move targeted at religious minorities facing persecution in South Asia. In no way does it affect Indian Muslims, they say.
For many, however, the bill’s passage is nothing more than the latest step by India’s Hindu-nationalist government to cement primacy for the country’s Hindu population.
Further, by giving preferential treatment to individuals based on their religion, the legislation seems to fly in the face of India’s founding secular constitution, in place since the country declared independence from Britain in 1947.
One of India’s most prominent political scientists, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, agrees the bill violates the constitution. It represents “the first legal articulation that India is, you might say, a homeland for Hindus,” he said. “The signal is that Muslims are not on the same footing” as others in India.
Amit Shah, India’s federal Minister of Home Affairs, said in parliament that the bill served a specific purpose – aiming to help a targeted group of persecuted minorities. “Muslim citizens of this country have no reason to worry… This bill is intended to give citizenship, not take away citizenship.”
The bill’s opponents, however, ask why the legislation only targets primarily Islamic countries, and are dismayed by the signal it sends to India’s 200 million Muslims.
“There is no good explanation for why Myanmar’s Rohingya — or Pakistan’s Shiite, Balochis and Ahmadis — do not qualify as persecuted minorities,” writes Barkha Dutt in The Washington Post. “And if it’s about upholding our history of assimilation and being a generous neighbor, why does this bill only apply to the religious minorities of three Muslim nations? Why not the Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka, for instance — 60,000 of whom already live as stateless residents in camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu?”
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Sonia Gandhi, leader of the main opposition Congress party, lamented the bill’s passage as the latest step away from secularism and tolerance. “The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill marks the victory of narrow-minded and bigoted forces over India’s pluralism.”
The bill’s opponents point out that it is being put in place at the same time as the BJP enact the draconian National Register of Citizens (NRC), which aims to expel all undocumented immigrants.
The “NRC will be conducted across the country and each and every infiltrator identified and expelled,” Amit Shah said.
If non-Muslims have a de facto amnesty, those deported by NRC will now certainly be mostly Muslims.
On Monday, The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom denounced the CAB in a press statement, recommending sanctions against Shah specifically, and others responsible. “The CAB enshrines a pathway to citizenship for immigrants that specifically excludes Muslims, setting a legal criterion for citizenship based on religion. The CAB is a dangerous turn in the wrong direction.”
“We are heading toward totalitarianism, a fascist state,” said opposition lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi, who tore up a copy of the bill as he gave a speech in Parliament on Monday. “We are making India a theocratic country.”
