Is India abandoning secularism to exclude Muslims?

National Post, 20 December 2019

The new law offers eligibility for citizenship to illegal migrants from three Muslim-majority countries. Muslims are excluded.

MUMBAI, INDIA — Riots over religious matters have a dark history in India and the spectre of their return worries many across the nation. The proximate cause for the violence in the past few days has been the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed into law this month. But there are fears that the large majority won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) last spring may mean that this citizenship law is just the first step in a campaign to increasingly establish in law that India is a Hindu nation.

The citizenship bill has been around since 2014 in response to an influx of refugees. The large majority won by the BJP’s Narendra Modi in May meant that the government had no trouble getting its bill passed this month.

The CAA accelerates citizenship for refugees fleeing religious persecution. But an ostensible offer of refuge to the religiously persecuted has set off a fierce religious conflict in India, for the CAA makes a distinction based on religion. That’s combustible in India, where the post-independence constitution was strictly secular, meaning that the state is neutral between the many and varied religions found on the subcontinent.

That constitutional settlement came after the partition that accompanied independence, with the creation of Pakistan (west and east) as Muslim homelands. The implication then might have been that India was to be a Hindu state, but that implication was firmly rejected by the secularity of the constitution.

The new CAA violates that neutrality between religions. For that reason it may falter on a constitutional challenge, though the courts are proving more BJP friendly.

The heart of the CAA is that is offers eligibility for citizenship to illegal migrants from three Muslim-majority countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But it limits that eligibility to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. It excludes Muslims.

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