Can India implement’ citizenship law?
Political challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are mounting with a number of Indian states saying they will not implement the contentious law seen as anti-Muslim, and backing nationwide protests against it.
On Friday, Pinarayi Vijayan, chief minister of the southern state of Kerala, wrote to 11 of his counterparts, urging them to unite and coordinate their efforts as part of the opposition’s pushback against the CAA.
“Wrote to 11 Chief Ministers requesting intervention on CAA. Why we resist?” Vijayan posted on Twitter, along with a copy of the letter he sent.
“Apprehensions have arisen among large sections of our society consequent to the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. The need of the hour is unity among all Indians wishing to protect democracy and secularism,” his letter said.
Meanwhile, 27 people have died in nearly a month of protests against the law, with at least 19 of those deaths reported from Uttar Pradesh state, governed by a hardline Hindu nationalist belonging to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The UP government yesterday ordered identification of migrants, making UP the state first in the country to begin the exercise of shortlisting eligible migrants for granting citizenship. Sources said, this will also help collate data on illegal migrants.
Bihar Deputy Chief Minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sushil Kumar Modi has said the updating of the National Population Register (NPR) will be carried out in the state from May 15 to May 28 this year.
Opposition parties and legal experts argue the law is discriminatory since it singles out Muslims in an officially secular nation of 1.3 billion people, nearly 15 percent of whom are Muslim, who fear the law is aimed at marginalising them.
The fears have been compounded with a planned National Register of Citizens (NRC), a count of India’s citizens which the BJP wants to conduct across the country, triggering anxieties over the documents people would need to prove their citizenship.
NRC was originally an exercise exclusive to the ethnically-diverse northeastern state of Assam, where a movement against allowing any undocumented migrant, irrespective of religion, to settle there has been ongoing for decades.
A final list of citizens, published in August, excluded nearly 1.9 million residents, effectively rendering them stateless.
Recently, Modi’s government approved almost $130bn to conduct a nationwide National Population Register (NPR), which Muslims and activists claim is a precursor to NRC.
Critics say the moves are part of a Hindu supremacist agenda pushed by Modi since he came to power nearly six years ago.
Multiple petitions challenging the new law as unconstitutional have been filed in India’s Supreme Court, which will hear some of those pleas on January 22.
Several among the 11 states Vijayan wrote to have already expressed their opposition to the citizenship law and publicly declared they will not implement it.
West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a staunch Modi critic, has led several mass rallies in her state against the law. Last week, she said she will not implement CAA “as long as I am alive”.
Punjab, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra - governed by the main opposition Congress party - also announced they will not impose the new law in their states.
Modi’s government, meanwhile, remains defiant, with the federal law minister this week saying the states have a “constitutional duty” to implement laws passed by the parliament.
At a rally in Rajasthan on Friday, Modi’s close aide and India’s Home Minister Amit Shah said: “Even if all these [opposition] parties come together, BJP will not move back even an inch on this issue of CAA.”
Comments