US commission censures India’s new citizenship bill

Bloomberg

A US federal commission has called for sanctions against India’s home minister and other top leaders if the country passes a controversial bill that will prevent Muslim migrants from neighboring countries from receiving citizenship.
After hours of heated debate, India’s lower house of Parliament early Tuesday morning passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) — the next step in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hardline Hindu nationalist agenda.
The bill needs approval from the upper house — expected to come as early as Wednesday — before it become law. It proposes changes to existing citizenship laws to allow citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who illegally migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Muslims are excluded from these provisions. If passed as expected, the move threatens the secular foundation of the world’s second-most populous nation and its constitution that treats all religions equally.
“If the CAB passes in both houses of parliament, the United States government should consider sanctions against the Home Minister and other principal leadership,” The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom said in a press statement. “The CAB enshrines a pathway to citizenship for immigrants that specifically excludes Muslims, setting a legal criterion for citizenship based on religion. The CAB is a dangerous turn in the wrong direction.”
The US commission’s statement was “neither accurate nor warranted,” India’s Ministry of External Affairs said. “The Bill provides expedited consideration for Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities already in India from certain contiguous countries. It seeks to address their current difficulties and meet their basic human rights,” the ministry’s spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in a statement.
USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan US federal government commission.

‘Discriminatory Laws’
The government says the changes are intended to protect religious minorities escaping persecution from neighboring Muslim-majority countries. Home Minister Amit Shah, who presented the bill in Parliament, has defended it, saying Muslims do not face persecution in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh and therefore do not qualify. “If someone comes here to earn a livelihood or to disrupt law and order, then they are intruders,” Shah said in recent a TV interview.
If the bill becomes law, India’s tradition of secularism and pluralism could crumble, said Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Washington-based Wilson Center, who has closely researched India’s politics over the past decade, comparing it with Myanmar’s discriminatory law based on ethnicity introduced in the 1980s.
“What happened in subsequent decades in Myanmar — particularly the horrors of the massacres of the Rohingya — underscore just how destructive these types of discriminatory citizenship laws can be for marginalized communities,” said Kugelman.

India’s lost potential in Modi’s Hindu zeal
Bloomberg

Narendra Modi is on the march. India’s prime minister, aided by his powerful Home Minister Amit Shah, is bent on using his second term to entrench Hindu nationalism in the world’s biggest democracy, a land of multiple faiths. As the economy sputters, it’s useful to corral the Hindu majority behind the ruling party.
Modi already scrapped nearly seven decades of autonomy in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir. In the state of Assam, some 1.9 million people, mostly Muslims and many of them poor, risk losing their citizenship unless they can produce documents dating back decades. And Hindus won a court case over a religious site disputed for centuries in the city of Ayodhya, where Modi’s party has promised a grand temple.
Now, India’s parliament is considering a law to prevent Muslim migrants from neighboring countries receiving citizenship. The bill has prompted protests, as Upmanyu Trivedi and Bibhudatta Pradhan explain, with concerns that millions could be left stateless. There are questions about whether it’d violate India’s secular constitution, and it has set off talk of US sanctions.
There’s also the question of priorities. Infrastructure remains patchy. The millions of jobs Modi promised in his first term have not materialized. Many live daily with deadly air pollution. Women are gang raped.
With loads of untapped potential, India is often talked about as the next economic giant after China. But to take advantage of that, it may need Modi to turn his gaze back to jobs and growth.