THE CAA

On the 11th of December 2019, the amendments of the Citizenship Act passed by the Parliament in 2019 came into force. This piece of legislation is probably the one facing the most opposition since I started actively following politics in 2014. The objective of the bill is simple – to not consider people from specific countries and specific communities as illegal migrants, to drop all pending cases against them and clear their path for citizenship through naturalisation. This article is neither to support the act nor to blame it in the voice of the protesters you see on the streets in the JNU campus. I have rather tried to analyse the possible implications of its implementation.
The major opposition to the act comes on account of keeping Muslims away from its provisions. Some extreme thinkers have gone as far as to think it of the government trying to create a Hindu Rashtra. All these thoughts are too far-fetched and exaggerated. The Supreme Court, in the SR Bommai vs Union of India case has held that secularism is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution. When one says that a law based on religions is against our Constitutionality, one should be reminded that the very first laws passed in our Parliament were also meant for specific communities.
For a moment I can agree to the reasoning given by the government that the bill intends to give relief to persecuted communities. The humanitarian intention of providing citizenship to persecuted communities living in India also stems from the fact that in 2017, the MEA started granting passports to Tibetan refugees, but only after multiple of them approached the judiciary and it ruled in their favour. The answer as to why persecuted Muslims were excluded was given that there is a case by case decision taken, and that their path to citizenship has not been closed. In 2005, the then Congress govt in power, however, refused to grant citizenship to Taslima Nasrin, the popular writer who fled from Bangladesh.
A genuine question that one should instead be asking is if it is ok to provide a free ticket of citizenship to illegal migrants just because we believe they have fled to India because they were persecuted. The concerns of the people of Assam are legitimate. A significant chunk of these people who moved to India before 31st December 2014 have been staying there. Saying that they get citizenship would mean they get all legal rights as a citizen, including the right to vote, the right to own land, a share of Assam’s public distribution system and also the power to contest elections. No sane person would be ok with his neighbours entering his house illegally, staying there for long even after repeated attempts to get them out, and finally the government asking the owner to let them stay legally and giving these neighbours the full right to be masters of the house! While people from other states do say that our state will take them in, they do realise that they aren’t speaking on behalf of their state government. In today’s India when there is a clear-cut distinction by the state between the locals and migrants (legal Indian citizens from other states), you cannot expect them to happily take in migrants who have just become Indian citizens! It would have been rather better had these people been given lifetime visas or refugee status, and a window for them to return to their homeland, after it was safe, so that their powers would remain curtailed.
Even if one does believe that the act was humanitarian, I do believe it has been enacted at a wrong time. Many won’t know that the Citizenship Amendment Bill was first passed in the Lok Sabha in 2016, but it hardly created any hullabaloo. The revocation of the special status of Jammu & Kashmir in August, the ensuing communication blockade and the immediate passage of the act in December in the same year was too much for us to digest. The former had already created suspicions for India’s image in the world, so much so that China had to organise a special meeting in the UNSC and India had to clarify its internal matter in New York! India’s image is already being tarnished by the fact that almost 67% of documented internet blackouts have occurred here. At a time when foreign dignitaries are still visiting Kashmir to check the situation, India has given the world yet another trigger. The ambiguous statements from the Home Minister on NRC have further spread fear amongst the masses.




By stressing the fact that the act is meant to heal persecuted communities, India has indirectly voiced that these communities were and are being oppressed in the said countries. As Indo-Pakistan relations were never good in the first place, such a declaration has the possibility to trigger fault lines in Indo-Bangladeshi and Indo-Afghan relations. This is evident from the fact that after the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister and Home Minister, their deputy Foreign Minister also cancelled his New Delhi visit to the Raisina dialogue, although all citing different official reasons. There could have been a different way of addressing the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh when the incidences were brought into light and Hindus were still fleeing long after the war ended. The present Bangladeshi government will not tolerate any claims of persecution.