MUSLIMS LIVING AS MINORITIES
This Land is Mine Is the world’s largest democracy, the secular and humanist Republic of India, on its deathbed? BY HARSH MANDER
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nder constant siege, weather-beaten and broken, the edifice of India’s constitution founded on the ideals of equal citizenship for people of all faiths and castes has endured — at least so far. And it continues to do so, despite the numerous onslaughts and rapidly mounting tension that have occurred, especially since the mandate given to the Narendra Modi government in 2014 and the even more emphatic mandate of 2019. However, the Indian Parliament’s passing of the Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 had put India’s constitutional structure in danger of caving in. Make no mistake. This act does not require that the Constitution be rewritten; rather, its passage and the creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) threatens this document’s very soul with annihilation, for a new nation is now struggling to emerge from its rubble — one that is wrathful, muscular, majoritarian and inhospitable to its minorities. This law is the result of tangled contestations of belonging and rights. Who belongs to India, and on what terms? And indeed, to whom does India belong? As the young Bengali-origin Assamese poet Kazi Neel laments, “This land is mine. But I am not of this land.” He loves India, but India refuses to claim him. Citizenship ultimately is the right to have rights. Who in this country should have rights, and from whom should they be withheld? The answer to these fraught questions was settled within the Constitution’s humanist and inclusive framework. Its iridescent central premise was that religious faith has no bearing on eligibility for citizenship, for the country belongs equally to its Muslim, Christian and Zoroastrian residents, just as much as it does to its Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain residents. And yet it was these very questions of belonging and religion as politics that tore India apart. The All-India Muslim League (1906-47; https://www.britannica.com/
topic/Muslim-League) regarded religion as key to citizenship; therefore, India was not one but two nations — Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1962), founder of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_ Mahasabha) asserted that India belonged only to its Hindu majority. However, the Constituent Assembly steadfastly rejected this idea. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, declared, “We accept as Indian anyone who calls himself a citizen of India.” By introducing the CAA, the BJP-led government has deliberately reopened old wounds, thereby reviving the old fears, anxieties and hatreds of [the 1947] Partition. In effect, this law endorses the two-nation theory by creating a hierarchy of citizenship based on religious faith — a hierarchy from which Muslims are deliberately excluded. The moral fig leaf offered is that this law will provide refuge to Hindus allegedly suffering religious persecution in the neighboring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh [which India helped create in 1971 through direct military intervention] and Afghanistan. If religious persecution were truly to become the yardstick for becoming eligible for citizenship, then few neighbors would be more entitled to it than the tormented Rohingya battling genocide in Myanmar and Xinjiang’s interned Uyghur Muslims. Until 1987, the only criterion for securing Indian citizenship was to be born in India. However, spurred by populist movements alleging massive illegal migration from Bangladesh, the citizenship law was amended to require that at least one parent be a citizen of India. It was further amended in 2004 to prescribe that not only must one parent be a citizen, but also that the other should not be an illegal immigrant. Supported and led by the Supreme Court, the Indian state undertook a massive program that required all residents of Assam, a northeastern state that shares two borders with Bangladesh, to prove that they
28 ISLAMIC HORIZONS MARCH/APRIL 2021
Assamese Muslims pour over National Register of Citizens paperwork (Photo © countercurrents.org)
were Indian citizens based on a complex maze of documents. The BJP-led federal government of India and state government of Assam became uneasy when the final NRC revealed a surprising fact: Far more Bengali-origin Hindus had been excluded than Muslims. If they were to be classified as illegal immigrants, the 2004 amendment would make not only them, but also their offspring, illegal immigrants. Only the CAA can rescue the BJP from this political conundrum. In short, it will treat Bengali Hindus as refugees and Bengali-origin Muslims and their descendants as illegal immigrants, even if they were born in India and know no other country as their home. Treating Bengali-origin Hindus excluded from Assam’s NRC as persecuted refugees from Bangladesh, however, requires multiple extraordinary leaps of official faith. For example, none of them would have claimed on any official forum — NRC offices, Foreigners’ Tribunals or police stations – to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; rather, they would have strenuously tried to establish the exact opposite. But now that the CAA has been passed,
