With the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 in the upper house of the Indian Parliament, protests have erupted across the nation. Some are protesting because the CAA allegedly violates the secular identity of the country while others fear that it will endanger their linguistic and cultural identity. Even though the CAA itself is a dangerous instrument to the nationalist ruling party, combined with the National Register of citizens (NRC) – recently exercised in Assam – the pieces have fallen into place for Muslim exclusion and the realization of an RSS-BJP Hindu state.
So, what exactly is the CAA?
The Act keeps provision of migrants from six different faiths- Hindu. Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Parsi- who have entered India illegally before the cut off date of December 31 2014 and have come from the Muslim majority countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh and have stayed in India for five years to apply for citizenship. According to the union government, Muslims have been excluded because people of these six faiths have faced persecution in the three Muslim countries, Muslims have not.
What is the NRC and what does it have to do with the CAA?
At its core, the NRC is an official record of those who are legal Indian citizens. It includes demographic information about all those individuals who qualify as citizens of India as per the Citizenship Act, 1955. The register was first prepared after the 1951 Census of India and since then it has not been updated until recently. The register has only been kept in the state of Assam to mainly detect illegal immigrants streaming in mostly from Bangladesh. Even though union home minister Amit Shah has claimed a statewide NRC to be implemented by 2024, Mr. Modi has publicly contradicted this claim.
Even though the union government has been blunt in declaring that there is no connection between the NRC and the CAA, it is not very had to see the clear relationship that the two possess. Think of the NRC as the lock and the CAA as the failsafe. In the updated NRC published on August 31st, 1.9 million people were left off the list. If you challenge the union on the grounds that the NRC is a blatant tool for Muslim exclusion, they will show you proof that out of the 1.9 million people facing exclusion, 1.3 million happen to be Hindus. However, this is where the failsafe- the CAA- comes in. The CAA as already mentioned does keep provisions for these 1.3 million Hindus to apply for citizenship even if they have been kept off the NRC, or in other words, established to be illegal immigrants. The Muslims who have been excluded on the other hand have no laws to fall back on. This is how the CAA establishes a backdoor to the NRC in order to promote and exacerbate Muslim exclusion in Assam and maybe one day, throughout India.
Jabir Mahmood Chowdhury
Editor-in-Chief