January 11, 2019

India's course of undermining long-cherished values

located:	India
editor:	Shadi Khan Saif

First, millions of people – mostly Muslims – were stripped of their Indian citizenship last year, and now new citizenship offers have been made to millions of non-Muslims – mostly Hindus – by the hardliner BJP government in New Delhi, which shamelessly denies discrimination.

A legislative bill was rushed through the parliament earlier this week, just a few months before the crucial elections, by the BJP government that seeks to grant citizenship rights to Hindus, Jains, Parsis and several other non-Muslim religious groups who migrated without documents from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Immediate motives behind this engineered bid to change the demographics on a religious basis seem to exhibit the hardliner Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strong desire to win another term in the general elections, due in May later this year.

It might not sound very controversial to many, but connecting the dots and a reviewing the track record of the Modi government would make any sane person alarmed about the direction India has been put on.

Firstly, the discriminative law based on the religious identity of citizens is in clear contrast to the long-cherished founding principles of the world’s largest democracy. India’s secular Constitution envisioned by iconic leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, guarantees the right of people to practice any faith of their choice and equality before the law, asserting that the administration can’t discriminate on faith.

Secondly, this has utterly failed the estimated 200 million Indian Muslims who have increasingly been subjected to arbitrary processes to prove their loyalty to the Indian state again and again.

With the right-wing nationalist Modi in power since May 2014, India has without any doubt secured significant economic growth. This, however, should not serve as a veil to hide the frightening increase in incidents of mob violence across the country that have targeted Muslims and even lower-caste Hindus ‘Dalits’ on one pretext or the other.

According to an IndiaSpend content analysis, Muslims were the target of 51 percent of violence centred on bovine issues over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017), and comprised 86 percent of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents. These issues were mostly related to cows, which are considered ultra-sacred by the hardliners that have killed a number of Muslims for buying, selling or consuming its meat.

And, now imagine what havoc the debate of citizenship can wreck.