- India losing its secular credentials
There has been considerable and understandable outrage over India’s BJP government passing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that discriminates against Muslims by providing amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. This is in tandem with the BJP government’s plans to publish a nationwide registrar of citizens (NRC) to identify illegal immigrants that has already resulted in 1.9 million people being made stateless overnight in the north-eastern state of Assam. Mass detention camps are being built to house them, exemption from which would depend on the production of birth certificates and similar documents that date back decades and would be near impossible to possess given the informality of record keeping in rural India.
People have taken to the streets to protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state-sponsored persecution of Indian Muslims, who are the largest minority in the country making up 14.2 percent of the population. The protests have been nationwide and violent, so far resulting in over 10 deaths and several people injured. Much of the backlash has originated on university campuses where Indian law enforcement agencies have brutally retaliated, beating up protesters including females and using live rounds, causing the deaths reported so far. Opposition party MPs and progressive liberals of India have spoken out against the CAA and NRC but there is little they can achieve as long as the BJP is in power with a thumping majority.
This episode simply throws India’s secular credentials out the window. The RSS agenda of a Hindu-only India is progressing at a blistering pace with the BJP at the wheel. The world’s largest democracy, which also happens to be a global economic and trading powerhouse, is degenerating into an autocratic intolerant state that actively thwarts peaceful protests and has started disrupting mobile phone services in its capital to recreate a situation similar to the one in Indian Occupied Kashmir where there has been an information blackout for close to five months. India no longer enjoys the pedestal it put itself on and accuses other countries, primarily Pakistan, of violating the basic human rights of religious minorities. Mr Modi is reacting strongly to condemnations coming from Muslim-majority states but he should notice how Western countries, that are non-Muslim democracies, are also criticizing his actions.
