New York
A leading American newspaper Thursday denounced as ‘patently discriminatory’ India’s new citizenship law, and urged all democratic nations to speak out against it.
‘The law, as India’s 200 million Muslims have correctly surmised, has nothing to do with helping migrants and everything to do with the campaign by Mr. Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah, to marginalize Muslims and turn India into a homeland for Hindus, who comprise about 80 percent of the population of 1.3 billion,’ the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, referring to the eruption of protests across India after the law was passed by Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) last week.
The editorial, ‘Modi makes his bigotry even clearer’, said: ‘The devil is in the missing details. Accelerated citizenship is offered to members of the Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee and Jain religions but not to Muslims. And the only neighboring countries named in the law are Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, all majority Muslim. Other neighbors, from Sri Lanka to China, where Muslims do not predominate, are not mentioned.
‘The not-so-hidden message is that the Muslim-majority countries abutting India persecute Hindus and other minorities, and that Muslims from such countries cannot be refugees even people like the Rohingya, some of whom have reached India after fleeing to Bangladesh from brutal repression in Myanmar….’
‘Last summer, Mr. Modi’s government abruptly stripped statehood and autonomy from India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, arresting many of its leaders and shutting down the internet. Also in August, Mr. Modi aggressively escalated a program of citizenship tests in the northeastern state of Assam, leaving nearly two million people, many of them Muslims, potentially stateless.—APP
