Pratap Bhanu Mehta -The morning after CAB: It will be a mistake to rely just on Supreme Court // Niraja Gopal Jayal - Faith-based Citizenship: The Dangerous Path India is Choosing
The Citizenship
Amendment Bill uses a legal instrument to send an insidious political
message: Religious identity will play a dominant role in assessing claims to
citizenship. Muslims will be increasingly marginalised from our conceptions of
citizenship. No one denies that a country has a right to prioritise amongst
different classes of refugees, based on a number of factors: Risk assessment,
availability of alternatives, historical ties, ground realities, humanitarian
concerns, international obligations or even security concerns.
But for a bill to, ex ante, name some communities and exclude others from
consideration in this pathway to citizenship is a clever way of keeping the
communal pot boiling under a legal imprimatur. The bill is not meant to solve
any problem that could not have been solved through a less discriminatory
process; it may even create more problems.
But where does politics go, after CAB?
We look to the Supreme Court for a semblance of constitutional deliverance. We
have no idea how a court will rule. But one of the lessons of our recent
history is that we misunderstand how a Supreme Court functions in a democracy.
The Supreme Court has badly let us down in recent times, through a combination
of avoidance, mendacity, and a lack of zeal on behalf of political liberty.
We often explain this away as if this were the failing of individual
judges. A particular judge might be compromised, or too scared to challenge the
executive or they may simply be obtuse in their reasoning. In law as in
politics, we carry on with the game, somewhere reassured that mistakes are
idiosyncratic, and are possibly retrievable by the very processes that secured
them. But what makes this constitutional moment pivotal is that there is,
somewhere, a looming air of irretrievable finality about the changes that are
being enshrined. But we should recognise that this direction is not going to be
set through the nice formalisms of law, or the contrived conventions we can
adhere to in normal times. The direction is going to be set by the mob, by
brute power, by mobilisation....https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-morning-after-citizenship-amendment-bill-6162497/
Niraja Gopal Jayal - Faith-based Citizenship: The Dangerous Path India is Choosing
The Indian idea of citizenship – as embodied in the Constitution and the
law – is in the throes of a profound and radical metamorphosis. The twin
instruments of this transforma-tion are the National Register of Citizens (NRC)
and the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). If the former is carving out paths to
statelessness for disfavoured groups, the latter is creating paths to
citizenship for preferred groups. While the first is, despite the looming
threat of its extension across India, presently limited to the state of Assam,
the second is designed to be pan-Indian in its application.
Not only do the two need to be read alongside each other, both of these
in turn need to be read in the larger context of the Government’s policies
towards minorities, whether in the forced ‘amelioration’ of Muslim women by the
criminalisation of the triple talaq or the clampdown, since early August, in
the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. They need also to be read in the
context of the acceleration of violence against minorities over the past few
years, especially by vigilante lynch mobs who have been thriving on the promise
of legal impunity. An adequate understanding of both the NRC and the CAB
depends on an appreciation of the ecosystem for minorities constituted by these
twin phenomena, emanating from the state and society respectively.
On the watch of the Supreme Court and under its unrelenting pressure for
the completion of the NRC within a certain time-frame, Assam has served as a
laboratory for a potentially dangerous experiment....
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/faith-criterion-citizenshipsee also
Suhas Palshikar: Scars of CAB will further burn bridges between northeast and rest of India / Mukul Kesavan: An evil hour
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