The Exclusionary Nature of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act

Mar 14

This past week, India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) came into effect. The controversial piece of legislation has been lauded by Hindu nationalists and admirers of Narendra Modi’s right-wing regime, and publicly touted as a safety-net for Hindus fleeing religious persecution.

A particularly strong piece that debunks the allegedly virtuous nature of the CAA is by Siddharth Varadarajan for The Wire. Varadarajan breaks down the (now deleted) question and answer document published by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs regarding the CAA, revealing the fallacies and inherent discriminatory practices prevalent throughout the legislation. On its most basic level, the CAA provides a fast-tracked option for obtaining Indian citizenship to Hindu minorities from the Muslim-majority countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan; blatantly excluding Muslims from the same fast-track amendment. Furthermore, the CAA’s exclusionary nature renders invisible the minorities most impacted by religious persecution: Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus and Pakistani Ahmadiyyas. This policy also implies that Muslim immigrants, such as Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees who have fled genocide, are not worthy of justice or political refuge in India, because they come from majority communities.

Varadarajan breaks down the on-the-ground impacts of such a policy:

...consider the example of two Indian women, one Hindu and one Muslim, who have been married to two undocumented Bangladeshi men, one Hindu and one Muslim. Under the unamended Citizenship Act, the children of both women are considered ‘illegal migrants’ and are liable to deportation along with their respective fathers. The CAA, however, offers a clear path for the Hindu Indian woman to live a normal family life free of the risk of disruption due to deportation. But the Muslim Indian woman must continue to live with the risk of expulsion of her family from India. And she will have no option but to leave India if her family is deported and she wishes to continue living with them.

On a more concealed, and perhaps even more insidious, level the CAA also expresses Islamophobic statements through the countries it designates as a threat to Hindus. As Varadarajan writes,

…the MHA and the Modi government has not been able to explain why a law has been made to accept religiously persecuted people only from Muslim countries and not from other non-Muslim neighboring nations like Myanmar, China and Sri Lanka. Is the government not saying that there is something unique about persecution in Muslim countries which is causing it to create a new law for its victims? What does this tell us about how the government view Islam and Muslims as opposed to other faiths?

The Indian government is cementing an incredibly dangerous stereotype as Muslims and Islam as violent and unwelcoming when its policies single out only Muslim countries as being hostile towards Hindus.

We recommend you read Varadarajan piece in its entirety to gain a full understanding of the exclusionary measures of the CAA as well as the misalignment between the BJP’s messaging around the amendment versus its on-the-ground effects. You can read the entire article here.

One particular proponent of the law is the Hindu-American Foundation (HAF), a fellow North American-based Hindu advocacy non-profit with ties to the nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad America organization. In a recent press release, HAF applauded the CAA, with Executive Director Suhag Shukla writing:

India’s Citizenship Amendment Act is long overdue and necessary. It protects some of the most vulnerable refugees in India, granting them the human rights they were denied in their home country, and the clear and expedited path to citizenship needed for them to begin rebuilding their lives. CAA mirrors the long-established Lautenberg Amendment in the US, in place since 1990, which has provided a clear immigration path for persons fleeing a select group of nations where religious persecution is rampant. I’m proud to see both the oldest and largest secular democracies in the world — the US and India — be a beacon of hope by extending a pathway to freedom and a new life to those who have suffered gross human rights violations simply because of their religion.

HAF also wrote, “CAA does not alter the rights of any Indian citizen nor does it establish any religious test for general immigration or exclude Muslims from immigrating to India, as is sometimes wrongly said and reported.”

There are several fallacies present in HAF’s press release, and HAF conducts a harmful misinformation campaign by not presenting all of the facts about the CAA.

HAF conceals the full truth about the CAA by purposefully overlooking the key detail that Muslims fleeing religious persecution will not be fast-tracked for citizenship, while Hindus will be.

Another fallacy in HAF’s argument is how they compare the CAA to the American Lautenberg Amendment. The Lautenberg Amendment aims to admit persecuted religious minorities to the United States, where they will continue to remain a religious minority, but will receive the necessary rights and protection to live comfortably as a minority community. Meanwhile, the CAA is only interested in admitting Hindus, which form the religious majority group in India. Set against the backdrop of the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP in India, as well as sectarian violence against religious minorities, the exclusive fast-tracking for Hindu immigration suggests a continuation of the current regime’s goal to make an ethno-religious, Hindu-only Indian state.

Additionally, the Lautenberg Amendment accepts refugees from both the Soviet Union and Iran – countries that have two very different religious profiles. Meanwhile, the CAA exclusively targets Muslim nations.

Teesta Setalvad, in her piece for Sabrang, breaks down how insecurity and social upheaval will inevitably be the result of such legislation. When such a diktat of the current regime undermines the foundations of secular democracy on which India was founded, protest will break out. Anti-CAA acts of protest are already brewing on the state level, with Mamata Bannerjee speaking out against the amendment, and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan (Kerala) and Chief Minister MK Stalin (Tamil Nadu) announcing they will not implement the CAA in their respective states.

To learn more about the CAA and its implications for India, check out our reading list below: