ON the eve of International Human Rights Day, the Lok Sabha passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2019, one of the most arbitrary and discriminatory legislations in the history of Independent India that changes the basic terms of Indian Citizenship and hence violates the core structure and spirit of India's Constitution and the character of the Indian Republic, only falling short of explicitly dropping the secular epithet from the Preamble to the Constitution. CAB 2019 effectively excludes and marginalises the largest of India's religious minorities, the Muslim community, thus redefining the established constitutional framework of inclusive nationalism in non-Muslim religious terms. With characteristic hypocrisy, a jubilant Narendra Modi described the Bill as being 'in line with India’s centuries old ethos of assimilation and belief in humanitarian values.'
The Bill promises to grant citizenship to Hindus, Jains, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis who may have migrated to India from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan before 31 December 2014 without valid documents. Muslims are the only community that is conspicuously absent in this list. The presumption, as mentioned in the Bill and elaborated by Home Minister Amit Shah while presenting and defending the Bill, is that Muslims are the dominant community in these three countries while these other communities constitute persecuted minorities.
This whole criterion is thoroughly arbitrary and brazenly selective. If the idea is to open our borders for asylum and citizenship to people persecuted for their beliefs, then why should it be restricted to only these three countries and these select communities and this artificially fixed cut-off date of 31 December 2014? What about Sri Lankan Tamils, Rohingyas in Myanmar and Muslims and Buddhists in China? What about secular rationalists in Bangladesh; Shia, Baloch, and Ahmadi people in Pakistan; atheists who defy religious classification in all countries? And if there is a record of rampant persecution in these countries, what has happened after 31 December 2014 to change that pattern?
The BJP is trying to use CAB as a communally selective answer to the anxiety generated by the NRC experiment in Assam which is now being readied for replication on a countrywide scale. In Assam, close to two million people stood excluded from the final NRC and it is widely believed that the majority of the excluded belong to the Hindu community. In the case of a countrywide NRC, the number of excluded will likely shoot up to tens of millions, and if the Assam experience is anything to go by, many of them will be landless poor, migrant workers or common working people from the Hindu community. The Sangh-BJP establishment wants people to believe that Hindus excluded from NRC will be rehabilitated through the CAB route. How a Bihari migrant worker, an adivasi household in Chhattisgarh or Gujarat or Rajasthan, or a farmer family in Tamil Nadu or Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh can be rehabilitated as a persecuted refugee from Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan is a mystery known only to the rumour-spreading and lie-spouting propagandists of the Sangh-BJP brigade.
Amit Shah has said that CAB would not have been needed had the Congress not partitioned India on a religious basis. This is a brazen and mischievous lie that has no connection with our actual history. History records none other than Savarkar of Hindu Mahasabha, worshipped by the BJP as its ideological-political pioneer, as the original exponent of the flawed and disastrous two-nation theory that eventually led to the traumatic tragedy of Partition. India could not stop Partition, but did not accept the two-nation theory and the Constitution drafted under the stewardship of Dr. Ambedkar promised equality and fraternity cutting across the religious boundary.
The spirit of diversity and secularism permeates the entire Constitution and strengthens the foundation of India as a united democratic republic. Pakistan wanted to define and consolidate itself on the basis of its dominant religious identity but within twenty five years had to accept Bangladesh as an independent cultural, political and national entity. The answ er to Partition lies in learning from, and certainly not repeating, the blunder. The BJP, on the contrary, is bent upon extending the flawed and disastrous logic of Partition and reopening its wounds in pursuit of the long-term RSS goal of a fascistic, majoritarian Hindu state. At the time of the drafting of India's Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar had described this Hindu Raj as the greatest calamity for India and called for preventing it at any cost.
Assimilation and celebration of diversity has indeed been an enduring ethos of India. In his historic 1893 Chicago address Vivekananda had articulated this ethos in these solemn words: "I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth." The Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 is a complete negation of this ethos and a total travesty of the spirit of the Constitution and the cardinal principles of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. In the name of standing by the persecuted minorities of neighbouring countries, it subjects the biggest minority of India, a key architect and stakeholder of modern India through all the ups and downs of the freedom movement and post-Independence journey of India as a constitutional republic, to a most blatant kind of discrimination and marginalisation. India must reject this disastrous CAB-NRC design.
