India‘s lower house of parliament has approved a bill that would grant residency and citizenship rights to non-Muslim immigrants, sparking protests that brought the country’s populous northeast to a near standstill.
The legislation, which still needs approval of the upper house, seeks to grant rights to Hindus, Jains, Parsi and several other non-Muslim religious groups who migrated illegally from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“They have no place to go except India,” Home Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament on Tuesday. “The beneficiaries of the bill can reside in any state of the country.”
Critics have called the proposal, contained in a Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019, blatantly anti-Muslim and an attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to boost its Hindu voter base ahead of a general election due by May.
The bill sparked a second day of protests in the northeastern state of Assam, where nearly 4 million people, accused of being foreigners, were effectively stripped of their citizenship last year.
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Protesters there are angry not because the bill excludes Muslims, but because it would grant citizenship to undocumented Hindus, who failed to prove their citizenship and hence were excluded from the draft list of National Register of Citizens (NRC) published last July.
The final NRC list is due to be published on June 30.
The bill is unlikely to pass the upper house of parliament, which is not controlled by the ruling party. However, if it is not passed, the government could pass a decree that would not require legislators’ approval.
Protests in Assam
In Tuesday’s protest, demonstrators set up blockades with burning tires and vandalised two BJP offices, disrupting traffic and business from early in the morning to late afternoon.
They also torched effigies of the prime minister.
Mukesh Agarwal, Assam police spokesperson, said more than 700 demonstrators were arrested. Police used tear gas to disperse crowds.
Samujjal Bhattacharya, leader of the All Assam Students Union, said the legislation would confer citizenship on the basis of religion, violating India’s secular constitution.
He also said that providing residency and citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh, with which Assam state shares a long border, would threaten indigenous communities.
“Already, we have a whole lot of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh who entered Assam illegally over the years. Now, the government is trying to make a law seeking to confer citizenship to Hindus from Bangladesh. We want all illegal migrants to be detected and deported, irrespective of their religion,” Bhattacharya said.
The issue of undocumented immigration from Bangladesh has spurred periodic public uprisings in Assam since the Indian government granted rights to Bangladeshis who entered the country before 1971 – the year Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan.
BJP’s alliance partner in Assam, the Asom Gana Parishad or Assam People’s Party, quit the coalition government on Tuesday to protest the new bill.
“We have always opposed the entry and presence of illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Our party was formed in 1985 with this promise of freeing Assam from illegal migrants from Bangladesh,” AGP president Atul Bora said.
“We therefore cannot remain an ally of the BJP after this move by the Modi government.”
