India’s Citizenship Emergency: Interview with Professor Niraja Jayal
Last week,
India adopted new legislation called the Citizenship
Amendment Act, which gives undocumented immigrants of several faiths a path to
citizenship but excludes Muslims, who make up about fifteen per cent of the
country’s population. The law is part of a pattern of persecution of Muslims
carried out by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and
his Bharatiya Janata Party, who seek to transform
India from an avowedly secular, pluralistic country into a Hindu one.
This past August, Modi revoked the autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority
state, Kashmir,
and flooded it with troops, in an ongoing siege. In Assam, another state with a
large Muslim population, the government implemented the National Register of
Citizens, which forced people to prove or lose their citizenship status. Immigrants
whose citizenship was stripped by the state are already being sent to detention
camps; last month, the government declared that the citizenship registry would
soon cover the entire country. The cumulative effect of these moves has been to
throw India’s democratic character and future into a precarious state not seen
since the mid-nineteen-seventies, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a
state of emergency and imprisoned her political opponents.
In response to the
Citizenship Amendment Act, demonstrations have broken out across India. Many of
them have been met with violence from authorities; several protesters have been
killed. To help understand the legislation and the widespread backlash against
it, I spoke by phone with Niraja Gopal Jayal, a professor at the Center for the
Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the author of
several books on Indian democracy, including “Citizenship
and Its Discontents.” During our conversation, which has been edited for
length and clarity, we discussed India’s uneven history of religious tolerance,
how Modi was able to exploit religious chauvinism, and the greatest challenges
facing those who care about the future of liberalism in the country.
Is India facing the
most dire threat to its democracy in its seventy-two years of existence? I am not sure I would
say it’s the biggest threat to India’s democracy. I think it’s the biggest
threat to India’s self-definition as a nation—the definition that India adopted
at independence, which was informed by the values of the movement for freedom
from British rule and embodied in the Indian constitution. I think that vision
of India, as a secular, inclusive, plural, multicultural democracy, is
certainly under threat more than at any previous time.
What specifically
is worrying to you about this citizenship legislation? And what might be coming
next? It introduces, for the
first time, a religious criterion as a test for citizenship. Obviously, someone
who supports it could argue that it only applies to people who are refugees or
illegal migrants—it doesn’t apply to existing Indian citizens. That argument
has indeed been made, but I think that it is a threat to the idea of Indian
citizenship per se. It is, in some senses, a body blow to the constitutional
ideal of equality of citizenship regardless of caste, creed, gender, language,
and so on. Ours is a secular constitution, and the worry is that the
introduction of the religious criterion will yield, effectively, a hierarchy of
citizens, a kind of two-tiered, graded citizenship.
The even bigger worry
is the introduction of religion as a criterion of citizenship in India, because
then you open up the floodgates. Like you said, what’s next? If this gets
validated in the courts, the next step is that there will be a national
register of Indian citizens, for which the law has existed for several years
now. That will be activated, and the promise has been made that it will be
completed by 2024, which is the next general election. If the Citizenship
Amendment Act, which was just passed the other day, is actually enabling some
religious groups to become naturalized citizens, leaving out only one major
religious group - that is, Muslims - what the National Register of Citizens would
do would be to essentially disenfranchise people, including existing Muslim
citizens, but Hindus as well who cannot establish, as per the list of documents
that may be required, that they are, in fact, Indian citizens.
In a country like
ours, there are very large numbers of poor people who are not lettered, who are
undocumented. As has happened in Assam already, you will have large numbers of
people, Hindus, Muslims, and others, who are nationals, whose ancestors have
lived in this land forever, but who would not have the documents to prove it.
You could actually, at the same time, have immigrants who have come in and
acquired documents, because that’s the first thing they need to do. You could
have non-nationals who have documents and get citizenship, and you could have
nationals who are undocumented and are stripped of citizenship. The worry is
that the burden of this would fall largely on poor people, and on poor Muslims,
because the others could get regularized under the Citizenship Amendment Act. That,
in fact, is the sequence of this thing.
What you’re arguing
is that we will see what’s happening in Assam start to happen on a nationwide
level. Yeah, that’s correct.
That’s the plan that’s been announced, partly also to correct what happened in
Assam. It turned out very differently than had been anticipated. 1.9 million
people were excluded finally in the last round, and a very large proportion of
that 1.9 million actually turned out to be Hindus rather than Muslims.
Even those people who have championed the National Register for Citizens in
Assam, in a sense, were disappointed and surprised by the outcome. Assam is
going to go through this whole exercise yet again when the all-India register
takes place.
Some of the people
defending the government will say, “Look, in Assam, it wasn’t just to go after
Muslims. There were Hindus who were on the list, too. This is about illegal
immigration. It’s not about creating a Hindu state or anything like that.” How
do you respond to that? The people who are
saying that would have to acknowledge that not all illegal migrants are being
treated equally. There is only one group of illegal migrants, the Muslims, who
are to be excluded from the language of this amendment. Everybody else is being
given fast-track citizenship.
The National Register
actually starts with the assumption that all of us, 1.3 billion of us, have to
prove that we are citizens. The onus of proving that you’re a citizen lies upon
you, and the assumption is that, until proven, you are not a citizen, basically.
People of my generation didn’t have birth certificates back in the day. I don’t
have a birth certificate. They are a fairly recent invention, and not everyone
even today has a birth certificate, unless you’re born in a good hospital in a
city. If you’re born in a village, often people are still born at home. Lots of
people don’t have the kind of documentation that is needed.
All those who are not
Muslims but who are illegal immigrants get regularized and covered by the
Citizenship Amendment Act. Who will be left, then? The residue is going to be
Muslims, right? Once you have sifted and sorted citizens in this rather
malevolent way, the Citizenship Act will cover all illegal migrants except
Muslims. The two things go together. What will be left will be simply Muslim
immigrants and not others, because others will then have got citizenship
through this amendment.
Yes, I was trying
to understand the connection between this law and then this larger registry. The connection is
sometimes denied, and some political parties are, in fact, closing their eyes
to it. The ruling party in the state of Bihar voted with the government on the
Citizenship Amendment bill, and now they are saying they will not accept the
National Register of Citizens. That’s a specious argument, in my view, because
the two go together. Certainly, in multiple speeches, it has been said that
Hindus need not worry, because they will be covered by the Citizenship
Amendment Act, but other illegal migrants will not—“other” basically meaning
Muslims.
Including people
who have been in the country for generations. Across the country,
there’s a panic to collect documents, and the panic is mostly to be seen among
poorer Muslims.There is a lot of misinformation about this as well. People are
lining up outside district offices trying to consult a few records. People are
sometimes choosing the wrong documents, which they think will prove their
existence as citizens but will not. In Bengal, there have even been suicides by
people who were anxious about not having documents.
Has the rise of the
Hindu right, especially over the past couple of decades, made you think
differently about the design of the Indian constitution and Indian democracy?
Or do you think that any democratic system is vulnerable?
This is not something
that came up only in the last fifteen years. The Hindu-right ideology has been
there since the nineteen-twenties. It has never been the dominant strand of
political ideology until recently. The Ayodhya movement was really the starting
point of the B.J.P.’s growth and its emergence as a strong alternative to the
mainstream parties. In the thirties, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar [a leader of the
Hindu-nationalist movement] enunciated the idea of the two-nation theory—that
Hindus and Muslims are actually two nations—even before the Muslim League
[which pushed for the creation of Pakistan] took it up. Today, everyone
identifies the two-nation theory with [Pakistan’s founding father] Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, but actually it was Savarkar who first articulated the two-nation
theory.
In a sense, the ruling
party now actually avows that perspective. It does believe that this is the
unfinished business of Partition. They do have a certain adherence to the idea
that this is the national homeland of Hindus, and everybody else is a
second-class citizen, here only on sufferance. It’s an ideological strand which
has been around for a long time. It has not been hegemonic for a long time. It
is now hegemonic.
How much do you
think that, especially in the last several decades, the weakness of the
“secular” establishment, often in the form of the Congress Party, is
responsible for where India is today? I think you are
absolutely right about that. The Congress Party has been weak in its commitment
to secularism. The opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid [the mosque in
Ayodhya], for instance, is something that happened in Rajiv Gandhi’s time. What
has happened in the last several years is that even avowedly secular
politicians are actually pandering to what they see as the Hindu voter bloc, to
the point of displaying religiosity publicly in order to not give the
impression that they are too pro-Muslim. They perceive the need to do that
because the atmosphere has already been shaped, the public discourse has
already been shaped, in a way that polarizes. That is the contribution of the
ruling party.
How helpful do you
think it is to think about the Hindu right today and the rise of Modi in the
same terms that we think of a lot of other right-wing leaders who have risen in
the last several years? And how much do you think it’s unique to India? There are obvious
commonalities that populist leaders share, and right-wing populist leaders in
particular share, but I think there’s one aspect that is sui generis and seems
very important, which is that, in almost every other place, when there’s
anti-immigrant political discourse, it’s against people who are recent entrants
into the society. But, in India, the other is not an immigrant; the other was
historically a part of the society for hundreds of years. Here it is different,
because it is othering people that are your own, and have been your own, and
communities that have lived together, even if they’ve lived together
separately, for centuries. Our cultures, Islamic and Hindu cultures, are deeply
imbricated in everything from architecture to cuisine to whatever else. It’s a
syncretic culture. It’s very different from countries in Europe.
That is
interesting, although, certainly in Europe, and also certainly in the States,
there’s obviously bigotry against people who have been here for hundreds of
years. In India’s case, it’s
both. Right now, with the Citizenship Amendment Act, it is the illegal migrant
that is the figure, but that figure then becomes a proxy for the Indian Muslim,
who is as much a part of the soil as any of us.
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