Suhas Palshikar: Scars of CAB will further burn bridges between northeast and rest of India / Mukul Kesavan: An evil hour
<Latest news from Assam and Northeast>
Parliament has passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The debate over the bill bears testimony to the significance of the values of constitutionalism and secularism and the importance of icons like Gandhi and Ambedkar. For, in defending the bill, the ideological deceit of the BJP — along with its cowardice — could only hide behind these fig leafs. Nowhere in the debates has the BJP or its supporters shown the courage to say that they want to change the basis of what constitutes citizenship. The constant refrain is that what they are doing is true secularism and that even Ambedkar would have been happy with what is being done.
Parliament has passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The debate over the bill bears testimony to the significance of the values of constitutionalism and secularism and the importance of icons like Gandhi and Ambedkar. For, in defending the bill, the ideological deceit of the BJP — along with its cowardice — could only hide behind these fig leafs. Nowhere in the debates has the BJP or its supporters shown the courage to say that they want to change the basis of what constitutes citizenship. The constant refrain is that what they are doing is true secularism and that even Ambedkar would have been happy with what is being done.
This situation is
compounded by a combination of over-use and abandonment of those same values
and icons by the “secular” forces. For long, secular politics has resorted to
these values and icons without bothering to infuse among the masses their
implicit message and meaning. They have also taken recourse to the selective or
symbolic use of these ideological and intellectual resources. Thus, Ambedkar or
Gandhi are conveniently used for limited purposes, leaving the public exposed
to distortion, fraud and rank falsehood in the name of the Constitution,
Ambedkar or Gandhi. No wonder, the larger
public, which was mostly unconcerned about the CAB during
the Lok Sabha election (Lokniti’s pre-election survey showed that over
three-fourths of the respondents did not know about the CAB), is now willing to
be convinced that the bill is fair and does not violate the Constitution nor
deviates from the ideas of Gandhi and Ambedkar. Such a complete rigging of
public discourse has probably never happened in our democratic history so far....
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/politics-after-citizenship-amendment-bill-6165948/Mukul Kesavan: An evil hour
Why should Indian
Muslims, who are already citizens, be hostile to a law that makes it easier for
religious minorities from ideologically Muslim states to find refuge in Indian
citizenship? For the obvious reason that the underlying purpose of the CAA is to
reassure non-Muslims that the all-India National Register of Indian Citizens
proposed by the home minister will only affect Muslims.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s problem with the working of the NRC in Assam was that the process excluded too many Hindus. The CAA is the BJP’s solution to this problem. If the all-India NRIC comes to pass, every Indian will have to produce documentary proof of citizenship but non-Muslims will have a get-out-of-jail card: they will be able to invoke the CAA and claim that they are refugees from hostile Muslim countries. Undocumented Muslims, on the other hand, will be excluded from citizenship.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s problem with the working of the NRC in Assam was that the process excluded too many Hindus. The CAA is the BJP’s solution to this problem. If the all-India NRIC comes to pass, every Indian will have to produce documentary proof of citizenship but non-Muslims will have a get-out-of-jail card: they will be able to invoke the CAA and claim that they are refugees from hostile Muslim countries. Undocumented Muslims, on the other hand, will be excluded from citizenship.
Assam’s experience
with the NRC shows us how difficult it is for people, especially the poor, to
furnish acceptable proofs of birth and residence and how disruptive, traumatic
and threatening the process of verification is. Before unleashing it on the
whole nation, the BJP needed a way of indemnifying non-Muslims (read Hindus)
against the existential threat of disenfranchisement, internment and
deportation, and this the CAA has supplied. The CAA is designed to reassure
non-Muslims while insidiously suggesting that Muslims who can’t produce
NRIC-mandated proofs of citizenship are ‘infiltrators’ and ‘termites’. The home
minister tours the country connecting the dots, reassuring non-Muslims that
they have nothing to fear while simultaneously promising to expel every
last ghuspaithiya (by definition a Muslim thanks to the CAA)
from the country inside five years…..
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/an-evil-hour/cid/1726976
see also
Over 1000 Scientists, Academics Demand Withdrawal of Citizenship Bill //Bharat Bhushan: Citizenship Amendment Bill is a bid to fashion an ethnic democracy
