Few days ago India passed the so-called Citizenship Amendment Bill or CAB that has sparked protests across India from people belonging to all walks of life.
Protesters have been shot dead by police and para-military forces, the internet has been taken down, but opposition continues to grow.
Draconian laws that prevent a gathering of more than four people are now being used across India to try and shut down protests, and thousands of protesters have been detained and treated as criminals. This is an abuse of power and an attack on the fundamental right to free speech and the right to freedom of assembly.
The Amnesty International has said: "Denying permission for peaceful protests shows an apparent disdain for the right to freedom of expression.”
Opposition to the CAB is not only growing within India but the United Nations has described CAB as ‘fundamentally discriminatory in nature’.
The Hindu-nationalist BJP government is re-writing history in India’s textbooks, institutions are crumbling, the public services are compromised, media is being silenced, and the judiciary intimidated.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP have ideological reasons for the new law that is discriminatory against Muslims and promotes inequality. There are no doubts the CAB is part of the BJP strategy of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’.
Since Modi came to power in 2014 he has turned a blind eye to threats, bullying, attacks and even killings of minorities that have increased exponentially. Modi and his party have single-mindedly focused on appeasing and obtaining the backing of the Hindu majority at the expense of all others.
In his second term, Modi is now unashamedly using legislation to legitimise his right-wing Hindu agenda. The BJP government first unilaterally dismantled the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir. Local leaders were put in jail, the internet was cut off, and the military put in charge.
Then came the National Register of Citizens, or NRC that was originally intended as an attempt by the federal government to identify illegal immigrants in the north-eastern state of Assam. Some 2 million people in Assam found that their names were not on the NRC. If they cannot prove their citizenship, they will be put in detention camps and deported. Those in Assam whose names do not appear on the NRC have been told the burden of proof is on them to prove that they are citizens. A quarter of the population of Assam is illiterate.
For the moment, the NRC has been confined to Assam. But the BJP government has plans to take it nationwide. BJP leaders have been using inflammatory and dehumanising language to describe Muslims. Home Minister and BJP President Amit Shah has described Muslims as “termites” and claimed the NRC would be used to “remove them” across the nation. In other words, a clampdown on the 200 million Muslims in India.
The international community must act now as Modi appears to want to build a Hindu Rashtra on the graves of millions of Muslims. We predict in the end the result of the experiment of creating a Hindu Rashtra at all expense will be a popular uprising and the eventual break-up of India.
The writer is National Press Secretary of Sikh Federation (UK)
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