NEW YORK Human Right Watch (HRW), a promi-nent international watchdog body, has called on India to repeal its Citizenship Amendment Act and to discard a planned national citizenship registry, saying they discriminate against Muslims. In a 82-page report, entitled: ‘‘Shoot the Traitors’: Discrimination Against Muslims Under India’s New Citizenship Policy’, HRW said the act, together with a planned nationwide verification process to identify ‘illegal migrants,’ can threaten the citizenship rights of mil-lions of Indian Muslims. The report also said the new Indian measures have also spurred violence against Muslims. It says the police and other officials have repeatedly failed to inter-vene when government supporters attacked those protesting the new citizenship policies. The police, however, have been quick to ar-rest critics of the policy and disperse their peaceful demonstrations, including by using excessive and lethal force. ‘India’s prime minister (Narendra Modi) has appealed for a united fight against COVID-19, but has yet to call for unity in the fight against anti-Muslim violence and discrimination,’ Meenakshi Gan-guly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in a state-ment on Thursday. ‘Government policies have opened the door for mob violence and police inaction that have instilled fear among Muslims and other mi-nority communities throughout the country,’ she said. HRW, which is based in New York, said the report is based on more than 100 interviews with victims of abuse and their families from Delhi and the states of Assam and Uttar Pradesh, as well as with legal experts, academics, activists, and police officials. The new amended citizenship law fast-tracks asylum claims of ir-regular immigrants from the neighbouring Muslim-majority coun-tries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but excludes Muslims. It was enacted amid the BJP government’s push for a nation-wide citizenship verification process, through a National Population Register (NPR) and a National Register of Citizens (NRC), aimed at screening out ‘illegal migrants.’ While work on the population register has been deferred to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Human Rights Watch said statements from the Indian home minister Amit Shah and other BJP leaders have raised fears that millions of Indian Muslims, including many whose families have lived in the country for generations, could be stripped of their citizenship rights and disenfranchised. The United Nations and a number of governments have publicly criticized the citizenship law as discriminatory on the basis of religion, HRW pointed out. But BJP officials have mocked and threatened protesters, while some of their supporters have engaged in mob at-tacks on critics and antigovernment protesters. The report highlighted the fact that some BJP leaders called for the protesters, whom they described as ‘traitors,’ to be shot. In February 2020 in Delhi, it recalled, communal clashes and Hindu mob attacks on Muslims resulted in more than 50 deaths. Witness accounts and video evidence show police complicity in the violence. In one incident, police officers beat a group of five Muslim men in-jured in the mob attacks, taunting them, and ordered them to sing the national anthem as a form of humiliation. One of these men later died. At least 30 people, mostly Muslims, were killed during protests in BJP-governed states, particularly in Uttar Pradesh. During other protests, including by students, the police failed to intervene when government supporters attacked protesters.–APP
