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Protests Spread Across India Over Divisive Citizenship Law As Protests Rage, Is India Moving Closer to Becoming a Hindu Nation?
(about 5 hours later)
NEW DELHI — Furious protests against a new citizenship law continued to erupt across India on Monday, provoking a harsh security response and presenting the most widespread challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he came to power five years ago. NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has rounded up thousands of Muslims in Kashmir, revoked the area’s autonomy and enforced a citizenship test in northeastern India that left nearly two million people potentially stateless, many of them Muslim.
On Sunday, police officers stormed a predominantly Muslim university in New Delhi, the capital, firing tear gas into a library where students had sought refuge, and beating up dozens. But it was his gamble to pass a sweeping new citizenship law that favors every other South Asian faith than Islam that has set off days of widespread protests across the country.
The protests have gripped many major Indian cities and are a reaction to the Indian Parliament’s decision last week to pass a contentious measure that would give special treatment to Hindu and other non-Muslim migrants in India. Critics have called the measure blatantly discriminatory and a blow to India’s foundation as a secular democracy. Critics say the law, which easily passed both houses of Parliament last week, is the most overt sign yet that Mr. Modi intends to turn India into a Hindu-centric state where the country’s huge Muslim minority — roughly 200 million people — is at a calculated disadvantage.
The law is a core piece of a Hindu-centric agenda pursued by Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, and many analysts predicted trouble. India’s large Muslim minority, around 200 million people, has become increasingly fearful, certain that many of Mr. Modi’s recent initiatives are intended to marginalize them. Indian Muslims, who have watched anxiously as one step after another by Mr. Modi’s government this year has furthered a Hindu nationalist program, have finally erupted. Over the past few days, furious protests have broken out on college campuses and in packed streets of a growing list of cities.
Protests broke out last week in northeastern India, where several demonstrators were killed, and have spread to Bhopal, Jaipur, Ladakh, Kerala, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Lucknow. Cars, buses and railway stations have been set on fire in an explosion of antigovernment feeling. Mumbai. Chennai. Varanasi. Guwahati. Hyderabad. Bhopal. Patna. Pondicherry. The disturbances keep spreading, and on Monday they tied up several areas of the capital, New Delhi.
On Sunday, when students at Jamia Millia Islamia University, a primarily Muslim university in New Delhi, organized a large demonstration, which many witnesses said started out peacefully, the police responded with force. Mr. Modi’s government has responded with troops, internet shutdowns and curfews, just as it did when it clamped down on Kashmir. In New Delhi, police officers beat unarmed students with wooden poles, dragging them away from stunned colleagues and sending scores to the hospital, many with broken bones. In Assam, they shot and killed several young men.
Videos widely circulated on social media show officers beating students with wooden sticks, smashing some on their heads even after they had been knocked down. In one video, a group of female students tries to rescue a young man from the grasp of the police. A squad of officers in riot gear tears him away and knocks him down with heavy blows. Even after the women form a protective circle around the downed student, officers can be seen trying to jab the young man with their wooden poles. India’s Muslims had stayed relatively quiet during the other setbacks, keenly aware of the electoral logic that has pushed them to the margins. India is about 80 percent Hindu, 14 percent Muslim, and Mr. Modi and his party, which espouses a Hindu-centric worldview, won a crushing election victory in May and handily control the Parliament.
“The police barged into the girls’ hostel, they barged into the boys’ hostel,” one young woman told reporters. “Students were running around to save their lives. Is this democracy? Where are we living?” But Indian Muslims are feeling increasingly desperate, and so are progressives, many Indians of other faiths, and those who see a secular government as fundamental to India’s identity and its future.
Dozen of students were hospitalized, some with broken bones, according to news media reports. Some witnesses said that gangs of older men had appeared on campus to battle students, possibly an echo of past episodes of organized Hindu-Muslim clashes. Some students raced to seek shelter in a library, where they were tear-gassed by the police. The world is now weighing in, too. United Nations officials, American representatives, international advocacy groups and religious organizations have issued scathing statements saying the law is blatantly discriminatory. Some are even calling for sanctions.
Observers said that while police brutality was common in poorer, more rural areas of India, it was extremely unusual to see it explode, on such a scale, in the capital. Critics are deeply worried that Mr. Modi is trying to wrench India away from its secular, democratic roots and turn this nation of 1.3 billion people into a religious state, a homeland for Hindus that will discriminate against others.
Lokesh Devraj, a product designer who lives near the university, said he exited a metro station on Sunday afternoon and saw a stampede of terrified university students running toward him as the police charged, sticks in hand, beating at whatever crush of people they could find. The students did not resist, Mr. Devraj said, and had no sticks or stones in their hands. “They want a theocratic state like Pakistan or Israel, where they give rights to one religion and the other religions aren’t given anything,’’ said B.N. Srikrishna, a former judge on India’s Supreme Court. “This is pushing the country to the brink, to the brink of chaos.”
A police officer ran at Mr. Devraj and his 65-year-old father, he said, waving a baton in his clenched fist. Mr. Devraj shielded his father from the blows and was beaten himself, he said. The police officer backed off only after Mr. Devraj explained that he was simply a resident trying to return home. “This is how waves of communal violence start in the country,” he added.
India, at around 80 percent Hindu and 14 percent Muslim, has a history of convulsions of religious violence. With this citizenship measure, the Modi government has been pushing legislation guaranteed to create anger and despair in India’s Muslim minority. Mr. Modi is no stranger to communal violence. The worst bloodshed that India has seen in recent years exploded on his watch, in 2002, in Gujarat, when he was the top official in the state and clashes between Hindus and Muslims killed more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims.
It comes against a steady drumbeat of anti-Muslim moves by Mr. Modi’s government and its allies across India’s states, including changing historic place names from Muslim names to Hindu ones; editing government-issued textbooks to remove mentions of historic Muslim rulers; and stripping away statehood from what was India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, and indefinitely incarcerating hundreds of Muslim Kashmiris. Mr. Modi was widely blamed for not doing enough to stop it. Courts have cleared him, but many people believe he was at least partly responsible for the brutality that unfolded.
The new citizenship legislation, called the Citizenship Amendment Act, expedites Indian citizenship for migrants from some of India’s neighboring countries if they are Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee or Jain. Only one major religion in South Asia was conspicuously left off: Islam. His grip on power is still firm, even with a weakening economy. The political opposition, including the once-dominant Indian National Congress party, has been disorganized and shaky compared with the juggernaut he and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, the home minister, have built in their Bharatiya Janata Party.
Indian officials have denied any anti-Muslim bias and said the measure was intended purely to help persecuted minorities migrating from India’s predominantly Muslim neighbors — namely Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. But this contentious citizenship law, which paves a special path for non-Muslim migrants in India to become citizens, has galvanized the opposition. Rival opposition leaders who usually can’t agree on anything are planning protests together. Students from across the country are rallying to each other’s defense. Each episode of harsh police action captured by mobile phone and beamed around cyberspace catalyzes more sympathy, more protests — and more prospects for violence.
The legislation, which passed through both houses of Parliament last week, follows hand in hand with a divisive citizenship test conducted this summer in one state in northern India and possibly soon to be expanded nationwide. On Monday, Mr. Modi called for calm, saying on Twitter that the law “does not affect any citizen of India of any religion” and “the need of the hour is for all of us to work together.’’
All residents of the state of Assam, along the Bangladesh border, had to produce documentary proof that they or their ancestors had lived in India since 1971. Around two million of Assam’s population of 33 million — a mix of Hindus and Muslims — failed to pass the test, and these people now risk being rendered stateless. Huge new prisons are being built to incarcerate anyone determined to be an illegal immigrant. This citizenship law was a much touted campaign promise and a special wish of his Hindu base. His supporters see a future India as a place that emphasizes its Hindu heritage as much as possible and eliminates the special legal protections that exist for Muslims and other minorities.
Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister and Mr. Modi’s right-hand man, has vowed to bring citizenship tests nationwide. A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both of these measures — the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law — to render millions of Muslims who have been living in India for generations stateless. Some analysts are quick to point out that the course Mr. Modi’s party is charting could lead to an India dominated by one faith and one viewpoint, where existential tensions hold back the economy and hamstring politics — as embodied by Pakistan, India’s struggling, Islamic archenemy next door. "We’re chasing a failed dream,’' said Yogendra Yadav, a political commentator.
International organizations have sharply criticized the direction India is headed. The new citizenship legislation, called the Citizenship Amendment Act, expedites Indian citizenship for migrants from some of India’s neighboring countries if they are Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee or Jain. Only one major religion in South Asia was left off: Islam.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called the citizenship act “fundamentally discriminatory.” And the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal body, called the measure a “dangerous turn in the wrong direction” and said last week that the United States should consider sanctions against India if the bill passes. Indian officials have denied any anti-Muslim bias and said the measure was intended purely to help persecuted minorities migrating from India’s predominantly Muslim neighbors — Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
Maria Abi-Habib contributed reporting. The legislation follows hand in hand with a divisive citizenship test conducted this summer in one state in northern India and possibly soon to be expanded nationwide.
All residents of Assam, along the Bangladesh border, had to produce documentary proof that they or their ancestors lived in India since 1971. Around two million of Assam’s population of 33 million — a mix of Hindus and Muslims — failed to pass the test and now risk being rendered stateless. Huge new prisons are being built to house anyone determined to be an illegal immigrant.
A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both these measures — the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law — to strip away rights from Muslims who have been living in India for generations. The way this will happen, many Muslim Indians fear, is that they will be unable to produce the old birth certificates or property deeds necessary to prove citizenship. And while Hindu residents in the same situation would now seem to be given a pass, Muslim residents would have no legal protection.
The protests started last week in Assam, led by Hindus and joined by Assamese Muslims and Christians. Many Hindus in Assam don’t like the new law either: They fear it could open the floodgates to poor migrants who will settle in Assam and take their land. And so, despite the legislation’s potential to drive a sectarian wedge across India, in Assam it backfired, unifying protesters across religious lines.
Witnesses said that security forces fired live ammunition into a crowd, killing a 17-year-old Christian student as he walked home. Outraged demonstrators then burned down train stations and attacked the police.
Struggling to maintain control, the central government sent in the army and shut down the internet. The angry crowds only grew.
On Sunday, the protests spread to Delhi. Students of Jamia Millia Islamia University, a predominantly Muslim institution, gathered peacefully, witnesses said. But chaos broke out after a separate group of violent protestersjoined the fray and began clashing with the police, witnesses said.
The police response was swift and indiscriminate, according to witnesses, and videos widely circulated on social media showed officers beating students. In one video, a group of female students tries to rescue a young man from the grasp of the police. A squad of officers in riot gear tears him away and knocks him down with heavy blows. Even after the women form a protective circle around him, officers can be seen jabbing the young man with their wooden poles.
Observers said that while police brutality was common in poorer, more rural areas of India, it was extremely unusual to see it explode on such a scale in the capital.
Waqar Azam, a 26-year-old student, was studying in the university library when students burst in and yelled that the police were coming. The students locked the doors. Moments later, tear gas canisters crashed through the windows, filling the library with choking smoke.
“What is happening to Indian Muslims today did not happen overnight,” Mr. Azam said. “If we don’t protest against it now, we will end up living like slaves.”
Mr. Modi’s supporters have dismissed the protesters as being exclusively Muslim, or from a die-hard political opposition group. But in Assam, many protesters said they had voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party and now regretted it.
On Monday morning, some 5,000 protesters, of many faiths, gathered in central Guwahati, Assam’s capital. One chant echoed across town: “Down with Modi!”
Reporting was contributed by Suhasini Raj from Guwahati, India, by Vindu Gobel from Mumbai and by Hari Kumar, Shalini Venugopal, Sameer Yasir and Karan Deep Singh from New Delhi.