Indian Government Going to War Against Its Own People
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- Published on Thursday, 19 December 2019 22:22
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1958 ... December 20, 2019
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Indian Government Going to War Against Its Own People
Vijay Prashad
On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This "fundamentally discriminatory" Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. It does not mention Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own constitution.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi put this bill before both the lower and upper houses of India’s Parliament. Apart from the Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house... (the Lok Sabha) was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim margin -- 125 votes to 105.
Protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law. There are 200 million Muslim citizens of India, almost 15 per cent of the population; this bill sends a clear message that they should see themselves as second-class citizens. There is no other interpretation of the BJP’s agenda here.
