Imagine
4 people who have fled a neighbor country of India, because they were persecuted
in that country. Now, they are living
together in a small community in India. A
Shia who is targeted as anti-Muslim and blasphemous by the Sunni majority in
that country, a Ahmediya who is now considered non-Muslim in his Islamic
country, a Hindu, and a Sikh. They have
been living in India now for few years.
They have come to this country because this country has always taken
pride in treating all its people equally irrespective of their religion. Asaduddin Owaisi, one of the prominent Muslim
politicians from India, boasts that nobody in Pakistan or Bangladesh should
worry about Indian Muslims, because Indian Muslims have far better rights than
Muslims living in those countries. He goes
further to say that unlike in those countries where one sect of Islam is treated
as inferior, no such ill-treatment happens to any Islamic sect in India.
Now,
comes Citizenship Amendment Act, which says that it is going to treat these
migrants differently, based on their religious identity, singling out Muslims.
Because
of this Act, the Hindu friend and the Sikh friend become citizens in India, whereas
the Shia friend and Ahmediya friend are now shipped off to a detention center. It dawns up on all of us living in India, that
all of a sudden, this country has started to deprive someone of their basic
rights based on their religious identity, even though all of them came from same
country of origin.
To
understand what it means. Let’s create another
scenario. Indians migrate to US, settle
there and become citizens there. But imagine
US passes an Act, which treats Indians differently based on their religion. It opines, since Hindus are in majority in
India, they are prosperous and well off and therefore do not need to migrate,
and then they go about denying Green Card and Citizenship to Indian Hindus while
naturalizing Muslims and Christians from India.
How would Indian Hindus feel? Shouldn’t
Indian Hindus protest? Shouldn’t Americans protest this egregious Act that
discriminates people on religious identities?
The
reason why so many people in India, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, across
different religions, are protesting against this Act, is not because of the
actual modalities of the Act. It does
not really matter if the Act affects only the immigrants or illegals and not
the citizens. What matters is that this
Act allows for converting the State into saying, ‘you are special to me only if
you are non-Muslim. I will throw you out
only because you are a Muslim’. The fact
that this nation has made a law that determines the eligibility of coming and
living in this country, based on your religious identity, is very problematic
to every Indian who has always believed in the basic tenets of Indian Constitution,
that it is secular, and that it treats its people the same, whether they are
Shia, Sunni, Ahmediya, Sufi, or Sikh, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jain.
The
reason why so many Indians are perturbed by this Act is that for the first time
ever, this nation has passed a law that will determine the legal status,
citizenship status, and thereby according them the basic rights, based on
religious identity.
This
is anathematic to all those Indians. We rejected
the model of Pakistan that constituted itself as a religious state. Indians
are genuinely upset. Hindus who took
pride that we have always been tolerant, Muslims who took pride that while
other Islamic countries discriminate their own fellow Muslims based on the
sects but India doesn’t, Sikhs who believe India is their home though they are
a minority, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, all living with pride that this nation
is truly pluralistic unlike any other nation on this planet, they all find this
Act abhorrent, dangerous because its sets a new precedent, and completely unconstitutional
because it violates the basic principles of equality on which this country was
founded.
