Earlier in the year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, plead to the global world to abide by the value of unity and brotherhood, by invoking the significance of VasudevKutambakam in his address.

VasudevKutumbakam is the philosophy of the entire world being anintegrated, cohesive family, and people from all religions, castes, and creeds, its members. The philosophy finds its roots in the Sanskrit text of the Maha Upanishad, which contains the core ideas and values of Hinduism.

Recently, however, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has illustrated how the words of its leader—also the Prime Minister of the largest democracy in the world—hold absolutely no congruence with the party’s actions.

On December 8th, Home Minister Amit Shah tabled the controversial and blatantly discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in the lower house of the Parliament, which is yet to go to the President for his assent. The Bill seeks to open doors to the minority communities from the three neighboring countries of Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. It tends to provide citizenship to six communities – Christians, Hindus, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, and Buddhist. The citizenship is merely based on religion and faith, keeping in observance that Muslims are not listed – Muslims who number 200 million and comprise of 14% of the Hindu-majority country. The bill was passed by the Lok Sabha with a bulk of 311 votes against 80; supported by JD(U), SAD, AIADMK, BJD, TDP and YSR-Congress. The notion of a modern and secular country, built on the pillars of equality, has been toppled; it is redefining the idea of India.

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The bill amends the Citizenship Act of 1955 by reducing the naturalisation criteria for an illegal migrant seeking the status of an Indian citizen from eleven to five years. The immigrants who have entered India before December 31, 2014 would not be considered as illegal. The provision, however, is not uniformly implementable for all, as it is created for the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhists, Parsis, Jains, and Christians only. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) says its aim is to protect and accommodate maltreated communities from the said countries. The bill has turned religion as a means of deciding whom to treat as an illegal immigrant; a new act of marginalizing Muslims. The BJP, currently in government, has been attacking Muslims and their social identities since its inception, and now it has started to invade their political identities after passing the CAB. At a time when Muslims already see themselves as a second-class citizen, after scrapping of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir – a Muslim-majority state – on August 5. It was bifurcated into two Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh; first time in history to relegate a state to the status of Union Territory in the country. Restrictions, crackdowns, curfews, political detentions, and internet blockades still continue to happen in Jammu and Kashmir under the government of BJP.

In November, the Supreme Court of India gave permission to Hindus to build Ram temple on a centuries-old disputed Babri Mosque; the ruling was seen as a sharp blow to Muslims. The government has tactfully demarcated a category of people appealing to its vote bank, singling out the Muslim community. In a global scenario, where the Rohingya Muslims are being subjected to ethnic cleansing in their own country, and the Uighur Muslims of China are being brainwashed and tortured in concentration camps, CAB, unfortunately, seems to be in tandem with the growing tide of Islamophobia.

Interestingly, while the Home Minister made sparse mentions to the phenomenon of persecution to justify the current shape of the bill, the bill itself fails to do so. The assumption then, that the bill is based upon wrongful persecution can be put through scrutiny. In the mould that the bill currently exists in, a migrant fleeing away from his country for economic reasons would stand to gain citizenship if he belongs to, for example, the Hindu community, but another Muslim facing persecution on the grounds of religion would be unwelcome. In a nation holding pride over its secular values, the variable of religion, regretfully, has now come to lay the very foundation of granting citizenry and rights associated with it.

Inarguably then, the intrinsic motives of the government to give shape to the Hindu-Rashtra of Savarkar’s dreams are as clear as day. Citizenship, which was envisaged by the Constituent Assembly as a unifying factor in the aftermath of a bloody, communal partition, has now been given teeth by the followers of the Savarkarite ideology of nationalism, by turning it into a mechanism that is divisive and alienating.

Another point of arbitrariness in the bill is the cherry-picking of certain neighboring countries over the others. Minorities from neighboring countries of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal are ignored and not provided for in the amendment bill. The question thus arises that, on what basis does the bill bias against these countries.

The criteria, as stated in the Statement of Object, is the presence of a state religion in the countries included in the bill. It is argued, that the minorities in these countries face discrimination and persecution, thus India is to act as a sanctuary of safety for them. The argument, however, does not hold any water since Bhutan—one of the neighboring states excluded in the bill— wherein Vajrayana Buddhism is the official religion, is a case in point.

The hypocrisy of the government in pushing forward CAB in the veil of a prorefugee bill comes to light immediately when one draws their attention back to the government’s response to the Rohingya Crisis. In the month of July of this year itself, BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay had filed a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking the deportation of the persecuted community back to Myanmar. His stance echoed the Centre’s standpoint. Unsurprisingly then, India is also not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

As multiple petitions are still pending in Supreme Court challenging the scrapping of special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370, following continuous communication blockade, various groups and parties challenged the CAB bill in Supreme Court, which postponed hearing of pleas to 22nd January, 2020. After that, on 15thDecember, the protests against the bill rocked the nation’s capital, starting from Jamia Milia Islamia ( JMI) in New Delhi which eventually sloped into clashes with police, and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) located 130 km from the capital, both being historically Muslim universities. At least 100 students were injured, dozens arrested and more than 60 ended up in hospital that day. Later, students of various colleges and universities had taken to streets, and thousands of protesters stormed the roads with slogans and placards, and defied police restrictions and curfew orders in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, the state of Uttar Pradesh, and Bengaluru.

The protests had left two dead in Guwahati after police opened fire on protesters. Meanwhile, 14 people had been dead including an 8 years old kid, and more than 4000 detained, until 22nd of December. But, as usual the BJP government and police denied the casualties. Internet had been suspended in Assam, Tripura, and Aligarh. The government attempted to ascend unrest, and cut the internet in its national capital where thousands were gathered in New Delhi’s Jama Masjid on Friday, 20th December. To cover growing strife in other parts of the country, police were forced to disperse protests in Muzzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Firozabad, and Varanasi with tear gas and baton charge, according to many testimonials and video footages posted online. Not only Muslims, many non-Muslims had also joined the protests, saying, “this is not just a Muslim fight, it’s about humanity, and we will not let them fight alone”.

The fine letters of the Bill also stand in direct contrast to BJP’s own stand, further accentuating their hypocritical and inconsistent promises. The BJP, through the introduction of CAB, has failed to keep its word on honoring the Assam Accord. The cut-off date for an illegal migrant to attain citizenship rights in India has now been moved from July 19, 1948, to December 31, 2014. This shift translates into the costly activity of NRC being nullified since those excluded from the register can now legally apply for citizenship. In a single sweep, the government has rendered the battles fought by the Assamese in preserving their culture and identity from the Bangladeshi infiltrators as worthless. The exercise of NRC—as it is colored by shades of inaccuracies and discrepancies—would now cause to become futile.

The most helpless, however, will be those who would be left out by both the NRC and CAB. Then perhaps, Savarkar’s idea of India as ‘Hindu’stan—-the land of Hindus—would materialise, wherein the Non-Hindus, the left-outs, will be made to become subservient to the dominant community.

The bill thus goes against the ethos of the Constitution of India – similar to POTUS’ Muslim ban – and is a direct slap on the values of secularism and equality enshrined in the Preamble. While India as a nation has always taken pride in providing a home to all sections and religions of the society, the principle of ‘Unity in Diversity’ has been brazenly stomped upon by the saffron-colored Hindutva forces of the BJP.

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