Delving into the past for a future

India's controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) has finally become law with the President Ram Nath Kovind signing on it after its parliamentary passage. The bill sailed through the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha after a total of nearly fourteen hours of a polarising and consequently heated debate among the lawmakers.   

The stormy debate was expected given that the subject of citizenship on the basis of religion is divisive by itself. The law amended the Citizenship Act of 1955. It should be noted that even before the CAB, India had granted citizenship to people of different faiths from time to time including 566 Muslims, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the last seventy years.

It is not often that one sees lawmakers belonging to the opposite sides of the political and ideological spectrum delving into the past—the vivisection of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, the emergence of an independent Bangladesh twenty-four years later, and India's immediate neighbourhood—to discuss the future of India in the light of the law that offers Indian citizenship to six religious minorities: Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis who migrated to India after facing persecution, real or perceived, in those countries. In the process, both sides tried to score political brownie points. References to the troubled history of the partition were galore in the debate. One saw BJP President and Home Minister Amit Shah recalling the 1950 pact between Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan about the treatment of minorities and how Mahatma Gandhi had, in September 1947, favoured India accepting Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan. He also referred to Manmohan Singh as the leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha making a case for India's "moral responsibility" towards minorities facing "persecution" in Bangladesh.   

A quick sum-up of the main arguments for and against the Citizenship Amendment Bill: Amit Shah contended that the bill was necessitated because the Congress party accepted the partition of India on the basis of religion and the maltreatment of religious minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan that triggered the refugee problem in India. The opponents of the law argued that it was discriminatory towards Muslims and violated the constitutional right to equality before law.

The broad strategy of the government contention was that the Citizenship Amendment Law has a context—that of giving citizenship to not just Hindus but also other religious minorities from India's three neighbouring countries. But the opposition did not want to be constrained by the context of illegal immigration, and instead wove its arguments against the legislation around an over-arching ideological framework of secularism and equality before law while trying to ensure that it does not create a perception of anti-majority bias.

One notable feature of the parliamentary showdown between the government and the opposition was that the latter remained united in resisting the citizenship amendment law. This was in contrast to the situation in the opposition camp when the parliament had passed equally contentious bills—like the abrogation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir or criminalising the practice of instant "triple talaq"—with a number of opposition parties like Bahujan Samaj Party, Aam Aadmi Party and Telangana Rashtriya Samithi having backed the government.

The north-eastern Indian states may be embroiled in violence over the citizenship legislation but its most profound and visible impact, it is generally agreed, would be in West Bengal. Unofficial estimates say that about 72 lakh of the nearly 1.5 crore Hindus who had migrated from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last seven decades are in West Bengal alone, and they stand to benefit from the citizenship amendment law. It is estimated that many of the refugees who came over to West Bengal from Bangladesh in 1971 did not return. There are already reports of celebrations among Bangla-speaking Hindus in Barak Valley of Assam after the new iteration of the citizenship law was passed.

The law has clearly set off the race for wooing Hindu voters in West Bengal as well as in other parts of the country. The assessment in both the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is eyeing power in West Bengal, and the Trinamool Congress is how to win over the majority of Hindu voters in the next assembly polls in Bengal in 2021. This is the big change wrought by the citizenship amendment law. If there is one state other than Assam where the NRC and illegal immigrants from Bangladesh resonated the most, it is West Bengal. It was in West Bengal that Amit Shah had in public rallies used some of the harshest words about illegal immigrants (read Muslims). Hindu refugee voters are a key swing factor in 80 of the 294 assembly constituencies in West Bengal, while Muslims have a sizable presence in 90. Besides, some other Hindu refugees are also scattered over 40-50 other constituencies making up 10 to 15 percent of the electorate.

After the final draft of NRC in Assam left out lakhs of Hindus there, West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress Chairperson Mamata Banerjee had tapped into the apprehensions among Hindus in the state, and it fetched her party big gains in recent assembly by-polls as the Trinamool Congress won two seats it could never win before. The BJP found itself desperately looking for a turnaround, which it now hopes the citizenship change law would give it. No wonder the saffron party put up five of its lawmakers from West Bengal—Dilip Ghosh, Locket Chatterjee, Raju Bista, Shantanu Thakur and Soumitra Khan—to argue in favour of the law in the Lok Sabha. By contrast, the BJP fielded just three MPs from Assam in the Lok Sabha debate.

Both the BJP and the Trinamool Congress are trying to win over the Matua community voters who are a deciding factor in three assembly constituencies bordering Bangladesh (Gaighata, Bongaon and Swarupnagar). The BJP assesses that the most important fall-out of its bid to send a message to Hindu refugee voters in West Bengal through the CAB is to live down its image of an "anti-Bengali" party which Mamata has of late been projecting by stressing on Bengali sub-nationalism.

The BJP hopes that if the opposition pushes hard on the NRC and CAB issues, it would run the risk of antagonising the majority community, and the biggest challenge for the saffron party's rivals is to avoid that pitfall while not alienating the Muslims. The Mamata government recently announced that it would regularise the ownership of land on which refugees, irrespective of their religion, have been staying for long. The challenge for the Trinamool Congress was acknowledged by a party leader: "The CAB is a double-edged sword. Pushing back at it too hard risks the loss of Hindu votes and supporting it vigorously may not go down well with the minority community voters who have been aligned with the party all along," he said, requesting anonymity.

What is causing some concern in the Trinamool camp is the move by Hyderabad lawmaker and chief of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, to contest in the coming assembly polls from some Muslim-dominated constituencies in West Bengal, because that may split Muslim votes.

Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent for The Daily Star. He writes from New Delhi, India.