On the face of it the controversial citizenship amendment act of 2019 may appear to be purely humanitarian. It provides the government with a special provision to expedite the citizenship process for non-Muslim migrants – including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and Parsis — to India from the neighbouring Muslim countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan before 2014. However, the time chosen for its implementation just before the national election makes it rather provocative. It would appear to be politically motivated considering the fact that the amended citizenship law had earlier invited nationwide political protests, delaying its implementation for about four and half years. Few are surprised to witness renewed protests from opposition parties against the government notification on March 11 just days before the announcement of the Lok Sabha election.
As expected, Indian Muslims are miffed. The country has a Muslim population of nearly 180 million, the world’s third largest after Indonesia and Pakistan. Apart from Kashmir, West Bengal, Kerala, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Jharkhand, and parts of the north-eastern states bordering Bangladesh, have substantial Muslim populations. The opposition parties are naturally peeved as the CAA singularly targets at Muslim migrants before 2014. Not many are willing to accept the government’s reaction that “CAA does not cancel the naturalization laws. Therefore, any person including Muslim migrants from any foreign country seeking to be an Indian citizen, can apply for the same under the existing laws.” The Home Ministry insisted that the act “does not prevent any Muslim, who is persecuted in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan for practicing their version of Islam, from applying for Indian citizenship under the existing laws.”
The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has already moved the Supreme Court challenging the government notification and insisting that the act as “prima facie unconstitutional.” The IUML is a lead petitioner in the batch of writ petitions before the Supreme Court challenging the act. There are as many as 237 separate petitions challenging the legality of the act on the ground that it discriminates in granting citizenship on the basis of religion. The fate of the act now solely depends on the Supreme Court. Many feel that the CAA challenges India’s constitutional values of equality and religious non-discrimination. The act is inconsistent and incompatible with the country’s human rights obligations. While the 1955 Citizenship Act prohibited all undocumented migrants from acquiring Indian citizenship, the CAA fast-tracks the citizenship pathways for selected immigrants, providing them legislative protection from deportation and imprisonment with the exception of those living in the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura and the areas under the ‘inner line’ special permit zones.
Interestingly, a series of actions taken by the government in 2019, before the CAA finally got the president’s assent, may give an impression that the act along with other administrative decisions can be used as a weapon against illegal Muslim migrants. For instance, in June 2019, the government enabled the setting up of foreigners’ tribunals in the country. It announced the creation of a list of all Indian citizens under the national register of citizens (NRC). The NRC update means the process of enlisting the names of citizens based on electoral rolls up to 1971. The NRC was created in 1951. For unknown reasons, the NRC remained ineffective in most parts of the country, except in Assam where 41 lakh residents were not listed in the register till now. The new rules have done away with the independent and tiered scrutiny of applications of citizenship by district collectors on the ground, and recommendations of state governments as to the wisdom of granting citizenship to the applicants have been done away with. Under the 2009 citizen rules, the union government was required to consult the state governments in the grant of citizenship process.
Before the CAA, any foreign national seeking Indian citizenship through naturalization needed to spend 11 years in India to become eligible. The amended act expedites citizenship applications for a select group of religious faiths who escaped to India from religious persecution in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan before December 31, 2014. They become eligible for citizenship in five years even without valid visa or other necessary paperwork support. The CAA introduces a religious test for citizenship for the first time in independent India’s history. Arguably, this violates the Article 14 of Indian Constitution which says ‘The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.’ However, the Supreme Court alone can decide if the CAA violates the Constitution.
Notably, even more than seven decades after the Constitution of India came into force on January 26, 1950, Muslims remain at the centre of the religious controversy in the country. Although Hinduism is the secular country’s majority religion, it is not an official or state-sponsored one as India guarantees complete freedom of religion. Despite the record of the country witnessing several Muslim chief ministers and two presidents over the years, the community has done little to encourage modern education for Indian Muslims to noticeably represent in the civil service, military and institutions of higher education. Instead, Muslim bodies encourage the archaic religious education and creation of clerics. According of a statement of India’s minority affairs ministry, the country had 24,014 madrasas in 2018-19, of which 4,878 were unrecognized, although unofficially it is claimed that only one Muslim religious organization, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind has over 20,000 Deobandi madrasas in north India.
Despite making up nearly 15 percent of India’s population, the Muslim community did little to get properly represented in the country’s legislative bodies, including the national parliament and state assemblies. Their proportion in Parliament historically ranged between two and 10 percent. Now, the CAA is being interpreted as a process of persecution of Muslims in India. Muslims are concerned that the government may use the law, in subsequent combination with the citizenship registry, to further marginalize them as the NRC could identify and weed out those who came to India illegally. Thus, the CAA’s implementation as the ruling party’s pre-election agenda makes it a suspect. (IPA Service)
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