News By: Yara Khair
Seven years after India’s independence, the government issued the Citizenship law in 1955, which prohibited illegal immigrants from obtaining Indian citizenship, and ordered them to be deported or imprisoned. As a result of the victory of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata in the elections in 2014, it promised to grant citizenship to Hindu refugees from Bangladesh and Pakistan. So in 2015, the government issued orders to legalize these refugees, regardless of their travel documents, and grant them long-term visas. More than 30,000 migrants have benefited, the Citizenship law was amended in 2019, which provides a path to Indian citizenship for religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The religious minorities to which the amendment was applied were limited to: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Persians and Christians, and Muslims were not granted such eligibility, the beneficiaries of that amendment were also limited to people who entered India before December 31, 2014, and were facing “religious persecution or fear of religious persecution” in their countries of origin.
The bill was introduced in Lok Sabha on 19 July 2016 as a draft amendment to the Citizenship law. It was referred to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 12 August 2016. The committee submitted its report on 7 January 2019. After receiving assent from the President of India on December 12, 2019, the bill became effective.
The main problem faced by this amendment is religious discrimination, which prevented the granting of citizenship to Muslim immigrants, which led to widespread criticism in India and abroad because it violates the secular Indian constitution, which promises equality. Many popular demonstrations were held, especially in the state of Assam. India’s external intelligence agency, expressed its concern, and the Indian Muslim League called on the Supreme Court of India to declare the amendment to the law illegal. Commentators expressed concern that people who cannot provide the documents required to prove their citizenship would be accepted as immigrants and granted Indian citizenship under the bill but people from a community other than the six religious communities mentioned in the bill who were unable to prove their citizenship would face statelessness because they are not included in the bill.
Internationally, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom criticized the draft law and called for sanctions to be imposed against the leaders. The Bangladeshi Foreign Minister, Abdul Qadir Abdul Momen, said that this law may weaken India’s historical character as a secular state and denied that minorities were subjected to religious persecution in Bangladesh.
In view of the above, we believe that if this project becomes law, it will likely ignite religious divisions throughout the country, leading to major sectarian conflicts, so the project constitutes a “serious threat to the secular, democratic fabric of the country.”
Given that India has witnessed religious and party pluralism and many reforms despite this pluralism, it is able to issue laws that limit discrimination between these religions to place it among the developed Asian countries.
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