Malik Ashraf
The reaction against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed by the Indian Parliament seems to have engulfed entire India as not only the Muslims but other communities have also become part of the resistance movement against converting India into a Hindu state in line with the RSS philosophy of Hindutva. India is drifting into anarchy. Reportedly more than ten people have been killed so far as a result of the use of brutal force by the Indian law enforcing agencies against the protestors.
As the movement is gaining momentum so is the intensity to suppress it. There are no signs of Modi government backing off as is usually the case with the proponents of supremacist ideologues. Their strategy seems to be to brutalize the opponents of the bill to the extent that they perforce have to accept it as fait accompli. The redeeming factor of the episode is that Congress, majority of the intellectual community and proponents of secularism are backing the movement. Whether the Modi government will be able to subdue the uprising against the hate-laden CAB which the Delhi based journalist Anjali Modi in her article in the New York Times on December 20 has described as ‘India Awakens to Fight for Its Soul’ an explicit reference to the secular creed embodied in the Indian constitution, remains to be seen.
The Editorial Board of New York Times in its review of the situation in the backdrop of promulgation of (CAB) has painted a very realistic picture in these words “ 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. 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% of the population of 1.3 billion.”
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. Mr. Modi has vowed to extend the process, which requires Indians to prove they’re Indian, to the entire country and is building large new detention centers for those who can’t. The citizenship bill, by contrast, has provoked furious protests across India, some of which have been viciously repressed by police and the army. The government has also shut down the internet in several regions, a tactic against dissent used by India more than any other authoritarian-leaning government in the world, claiming it is necessary to prevent violence and false rumors. Kashmir has been offline since August, and India is by far the world’s leader in the number of internet shutdowns.”
Still, the reaction to the citizenship law has apparently surprised Mr. Modi, who was re-elected by a comfortable margin last May, but he has shown no signs of backing down. He rose to power by vilifying Muslims, a core tenet of Hindu nationalists. When Mr. Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat state, thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands were driven from their homes in sectarian violence; most victims were Muslims.”
This is not the way India was meant to be. The vision of Mohandas Gandhi (who was murdered by a Hindu nationalist) and Jawaharlal Nehru after the partition of British-ruled India into a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India was to build the latter into a secular and democratic Republic, with civil liberties for citizens of all faiths. Since he took office in 2014, Mr. Modi has actively worked to change that, even rewriting history books to exclude Muslim rulers — who, among other things, built the Taj Mahal — and changing official place names to Hindu from Muslim. Hindu mobs that lynch Muslims are rarely punished”.
I am sure Gandhi and Nehru in their heavenly abode will be feeling extremely distraught over what Modi was doing to India. Modi is also pursuing the Israeli model of land confiscation and an illegal settlement in Kashmir by repealing Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which granted special status to the state and dividing it into two union territories. The lockdown in Kashmir continues for well over 140 days making the lives of the people of the valley miserable besides inflicting economic loss to the tune of billions of rupees as per the President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce.
The Modi government is trying to repeat history of disasters that the world witnessed due to the advent of supremacist ideologies. But it is really regrettable that we hear only muffled protests and gentle rebukes from the countries which really can help in the reversal of the situation and persuade India to finding a solution to the Kashmir dispute in line with the UN resolutions. It is also disconcerting that some countries have shown criminal indifference to the inhuman indiscretions by the Modi government notwithstanding the fact that international media continues to expose its heinous machinations. The world community and the UN must take notice of the situation in Kashmir and the events unfolding in the backdrop of revoking of Articles 370 and 35-A promulgation of in India before it is too late.
— The writer is freelance columnist based in Islamabad.
