11th December 2019 marked a key event in the recent political history of South Asia. India – the region’s de facto power – enacted a federal law amending the Citizenship Act 1955, confirming the fears of Muslim communities, civil societies and politicians across the region and beyond. The fear that the Modi-led BJP government would go any unreasonable length to specifically target, marginalise and persecute the Muslim community in India.
Critics of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 see the law as having a polarising effect on modern India. Religion pitted against religion. Community against community. Essentially, under the new law, immigrants from three Muslim-majority countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – who fled their countries of origin before 2005 are eligible for Indian citizenship. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians are eligible with the sinister exception of Muslims.
Proponents (read apologists) hailed the bill as ushering in a new policy regime for persecuted minorities seeking safe haven in the great democratic polity that was once India. BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli described the legislation as a way to protect minority communities who could not come to India due to the Partition.
Critics are quick to point to the inherent double standards of the law. Opposition member Sanjay Jha questions the Bill on leaving out the Rohingiya community in Myanmar; arguably the most persecuted minority in the entire region. Or for that matter, Ahmedis in Pakistan, or Shia/Hazara communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who continue to be systematically targeted in their countries.
Either way, it’s clear the discriminatory law is only the symptom, not the disease; a trigger, not the weapon. The rise of militant Hinduism in India over the past few decades has gradually engineered a place for Indian Muslims that is beginning to look less and less safe, democratic and secular by the hour – a small corner in the periphery of mainstream India. A post- Congress India has witnessed the ideological rise of the Hindutva Movement – a movement painfully reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. On the ground, the movement has been executed through educational, political and paramilitary Hindu organisations notably VHS, BJP and RSS.
Unfortunately, the victory of BJP in the 1998 elections marked both, the end of an uninterrupted flow of successive, more secular Congress-led governments at the federal level, and the onset of a new political reality where divisions along ethnic and religious lines were to take precedence over notions of equal citizenship, human rights and inter-faith harmony.
It takes only a beginner-level understanding of South Asian history and politics to predict the spill-over effects one legislative development can have on the prospects of peace and stability in the region. Throw in the nuclear dimension, as the only two adjacent nuclear-armed States in the word with a past history of war, the threat of an all-out Mutually Assured Destruction is also ever-present in the Indo-Pak context. Even if the possibility of nuclear confrontation is ruled out, the human impact and communal spillovers of rising anti-Muslim sentiments in India can trigger a vicious cycle of communal violence.
History serves to remind that what happens in India, doesn’t happen just in India. In the immediate aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6th December 1992, over 30 Hindu temples across Punjab and Sindh were attacked and set ablaze in protest by citizens, condoned by the local law-enforcement agencies. While actual violence remains largely domestic in character, the contiguous ethnic and social spread of South Asia ensures that internal communal conflicts can have a spill-over effect of worsening the already strained relations between two countries still at war over Kashmir.
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