India hadn’t seen anything quite like this in recent history. Protests are in full swing in cities – from Kolkata to New Delhi and Guwahati to Mumbai — throughout India following the passage of a controversial new law, which will fast-track citizenship for migrants from many religious minorities, but not for Muslims.
Protests have already erupted in about 20 cities, including, Bhopal, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Lucknow. Police personnel swept through Jamia Millia Islamia University campus on Sunday injuring hundreds of students after buses and motorcycles were set on fire. At Delhi’s Aligarh Muslim University, the demonstrators were also met with police violence. In almost everywhere, students took to the streets in solidarity.
In protest against police brutality, particularly against the students of Muslim universities, the students from all over India came out in the streets furiously condemning Modi government’s racist policy of dividing India and denying Gandhi-Nehru image of India as the secular country.
Not only the students living in India, the students studying abroad have also expressed solidarity with the students at home. We see much hope in the younger generation not to tolerate any extremism to preserve India as a great democracy where peace and unity will prevail.
In the northeastern state of Assam, where all residents recently had to provide documents proving they are legal citizens or face the possibility of detention and deportation, police shot four people dead during demonstrations over the past few days.
The present situation threw one of the biggest challenges ever to confront Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is a congenital Muslim hater and killer. It seems implementing the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) is one of Modi’s main priorities claiming it is to protect persecuted minorities.
As per CAB: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who came to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan won’t be treated as illegal; they’ll get citizenship. But the Muslims, who are about 200 million or 14 percent of the India’s total population, have been excluded from such facility.
Modi, however, insists the CAB and National Register of Citizens (NRC) are not intended to target Muslims. He implored Indians via Twitter to “maintain peace” and “stay away from any sort of rumor-mongering and falsehoods.”
But things aren’t so easy. The Muslims are frightened because the new law CAB is closely linked with another contentious document NRC.
India’s Constitution guarantees everyone equality under the law. Religion cannot be a criterion for citizenship eligibility, a decision that goes all the way back to the 1940s, when India was founded as a secular state with special protections for minorities like Muslims.
Earlier this week, the United Nations Human Rights office voiced concern that the CAB was discriminatory in nature. But the BJP government said there was no religious bias, and that the move aimed to accommodate those who have fled religious persecution.
The US expressed concern about the implications of the CAB. “One of India’s great strengths is its Constitution. As a fellow democracy, we respect India’s institutions, but are concerned about the implications of the CAB Bill,” Sam Brownback, Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, said in a tweet.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Saturday said the CAB would “shred the soul” of India as she launched a scathing attack on ‘Modi-Shah government’ over the law, alleging their sole agenda was to make people fight to serve their politics, and vowed that her party would not retreat from its struggle against injustice.
The West Bengal has also exploded over the CAB-NRC issue. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee reacted sharply against CAB. “So what if the bill was passed in Parliament? The state still has to implement it. We are not going to do that, “she said.
This is the time for us also to oppose Modi’s unfriendly push of Muslims to Bangladesh. He collaborated with Myanmar government to force lakhs of Rohingya Muslims flee their homes and leave everything to come to Bangladesh as refugees. They are an unbearable burden for the people of Bangladesh.
The same Prime Minister of India has engineered the new citizenship law against Muslims. Our friendship with India should not mean its government will feel free to create crisis in Bangladesh.
We have to show our backbone.
