The CAA in India: a democratically-sanctioned genocide underway?
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Prisha Bhandari investigates the troubling implications of new legislation enacted by the government of India.
The implementation of the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) erupted protests across India from December 2019, which did not seem to exhaust until the recent pandemic-driven lockdowns were imposed. Supporters of the ruling party are calling the protestors “anti-nationals”, but those who support the protestors champion them as patriots of secularity. What started out as a bill to protect persecuted religious minorities from neighbouring countries is now being criticised across the globe, and has the potential to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship. More worryingly, it could also be a prequel to state-sponsored genocide: extermination through institutionalised, democratic procedures coupled with overlooked massacres carried out by Hindu nationalists.
The protests across India today are dynamic. They are an amalgamation of built-up anger against the ruling government’s blatant Islamophobia, the crippled economy, police brutality, and a host of other factors. To understand them, we must look at the history of the ruling party, BJP. In the 1950s, Hindu nationalism was a weak ideology, and BJP won only two parliamentary seats in its first election. Following this blow, the party moved away from secularism and Gandhian socialism towards hard-line “Hindutva” ideologies, and aligned itself further with the RSS – a paramilitary nationalist organisation. In the ‘90s, BJP’s then president L.K. Advani supported the movement to build a temple in the birth city of Hindu deity Ram over Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque. His attempts to mobilise volunteers for paying respects to Lord Ram at the mosque were stopped over fears of communal violence, and two years after this incident a mob demolished the mosque. This led to anti-Muslim riots, killing an estimated 2,000 people in the immediate aftermath.
Over time, BJP became the dominant opposition to the Indian National Congress, and seized its growing unpopularity due to high inflation and corruption scandals by offering a “party with a difference”. After Amit Shah became the party president, BJP developed further closer ties to RSS, the latter exercising greater control on the party. Rising donations funded electoral propaganda, with publicity expenditure and outreach programmes far outweighing those of the opposition. This led to a BJP-led coalition, which has dominated the national discourse in a way no other party has in recent times.
The CAA, a revision of the 1955 Citizen Amendment Bill, allows illegal migrants to acquire citizenship as long as they are Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist and Christian immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. They will be fast-tracked for citizenship in six years as long as they entered India before 31st December 2014, with a requirement of 12 years of residency for naturalisation. In the previous bill, illegal migrants, regardless of their religion, could not acquire citizenship. The government argues that this act provides shelter to persecuted religious minorities who have nowhere to go except India, as persecuted Muslims can seek refuge in the neighbouring Islamic countries.
However, this logic has evident fallacies. Persecuted Muslim minorities exist in Islamic countries, such as Ahmadiyya and Balochs in Pakistan, and neighbouring non-muslim countries have religious minorities facing extreme persecution as well. Examples include Rohingyas in Burma and Tamils in Sri Lanka, and these groups include Hindus and Christians as well. The government has so far failed to address this limitation. The deeper issue is that this law contradicts India’s secularity, by defining migrants by their religion.
The CAA is problematic in itself, but combined with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) it has the potential to filter out India’s Muslim minority by rendering them stateless. The NRC is essentially a list of Indian citizens, and if an individual is not found on the list they are required to present themselves at the Foreigner’s Tribunal with documents proving they are Indian, or that their parents or grandparents were Indians, to preserve their citizenship. The extreme bureaucracy in India, the fact that millions of poor lack documentation, and spelling errors causing a mismatch of documents all put one at risk of becoming stateless. The CAA effectively acts as a shield for non-Muslims left out of the NRC, as they can claim to be persecuted religious minorities and get fast-tracked for citizenship.
While the government has insisted that the NRC and CAA are not connected, the Home Minister Amit Shah has been recorded several times explicitly stating the two are connected, as the CAA would be chronologically followed by the implementation of a nationwide NRC to weed out “infiltrators”. This exercise has been implemented in the state of Assam, where 1.9 million were left out of the NRC. While this has been deemed erroneous by most political parties, BJP considered a revision for one reason – too many Hindu Bengalis, who form the bulk of their voter base in the state, have been left out.
Some may believe that calling this exercise “genocide” is a little extreme. However, compelling evidence presented by renowned expert Dr Gregory Stanton, in conjunction with his “Ten Stages of Genocide” hypothesis, is worrying. Stanton’s first stage is “classification”, which divides people along ethno-religious lines. The next stage is “symbolisation”. The community one mingles with, the clothing one wears, and the meat they eat have been used repeatedly for this purpose. The third stage is “discrimination”, blatantly seen in the case of hate crimes rising in the country. The fourth stage, “dehumanisation”, is again evident in fascist Hindu discourse – such as the president of the BJP comparing Muslim migrants to termites. The fifth stage – this is where BJP’s ideology and affiliations become important – is “organisation”, where militias and groups emboldened by government support enforce government ideologies and policies.
The sixth stage is “polarisation” via media and social fabrics; BJP’s IT cell has been actively spreading misinformation concerning Muslims through a narrative of victimhood. The seventh stage is “preparation”, and the combination of CAA and NRC effectively filters out a list of people to be transferred to detention centres. Voter lists were used under Narendra Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister during the 2002 Gujarat riots to identify and lynch Muslims, so it is reasonable to not downplay this factor. Stage eight is “persecution”, materialising in increasing police brutality, unlawful detention and confiscation of Muslim property. The ninth stage is extermination and the tenth stage is denial. Stanton places India at the eighth stage.
This may be a distant possibility. However, when confronted with the pattern taken by genocides across the world, and paralleling it with activities in India, a worrying picture emerges. One must also ask why the government has chosen this time to implement this decision with such fervour, in light of protests taking place across the country. India’s economy is facing a historic slowdown, inflation and unemployment have peaked to unforeseen levels, the IMF has credited India partly for the global slowdown, and the government has chosen precisely this time to conduct this expensive exercise. Is this a tactic to distract the mainstream population from the more pressing issues facing the country? In any case, the backlash faced by the government, which they evidently had not anticipated, has birthed new hope.
The massive defeat of BJP in the recent elections held in the capital showed that their campaign, which focused on religious polarisation and demonisation of peaceful protesters, had little appeal. When former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government resorted to autocracy in the 1970s, India emerged with a conscious sense of what it meant to be democratic. Hopefully, Indian society emerges stronger from this revolt against religious divides as well, with a renewed consciousness of what it means to be secular.
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