The Indian State’s flirtation with Nazism: Proudly Ignorant or defiantly ingenious
On December 11th, a bill known as Citizenship amendment Bill (CAB), was passed in both the lower and upper houses of the parliament in India which fuelled the indian citizens to get on the streets. The protests has been going on for past 10 days and as of now according to reliable media houses atleast 10 has got killed and 100s has been detained by police all across the country. Prominent personalities from academic, artistic, public, political, social and cultural spheres in India has found themselves detained by police or their jobs stripped off from them because of the fact that they supported the protest against the two aspects called National Registar for citizens (NRC) and CAB now a law known as citizen amendment act (CAA).
WHAT IS NRC AND CAA?
NRC is the exercise of making a national register for the people living in the country of India to sort out real citizens from illegal immigrants while CAA seeks to give citizenship to people from communities of hindu, buddhist, Sikh, Parsi, Jain and Christian who face persecution from the neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afganistan. In first glance one may find the exercise to be a humanitarian aid in the latter case while a logical data for a country to have in the former case. But here is the cliche, Tamilians from Sri Lanka (about 3 lakh of them are living in the state of Tamilnadu), Rohingyas from Myanmar (which UN has recently described as the most persecuted community in the world), Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan or Christians from Bhutan doesn’t find place in CAA while the NRC fails to give a clear cut definition of documents needed to prove citizenship ( which our government has been changing from time to time) and gives a new cutoff date of December 2014 while earlier it was March 25th 1971.
The seclusion of refugees based on communal lines is clear while the intend behind excluding particular communities who is in grave need of citizenship has been rejected. Indian constitution has an introductory note called the preamble which beckons the country to be sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic. Both, CAA and NRC going to be implemented countrywide goes in utter contrast with the secular character that the constitution laid down for the country.
Besides the preamble, article 14 of the constitution goes to great pains to explain right to equality of Indian people and article 15 explains in great detail about right to religion. The separation of migrants on the basis of communal lines defeats the basic foundation of the articles 14 and 15 of the constitution. NRC exercise has been implemented in the state of Assam with total cost of 1224 crore rupees with the whole procedure, with 19 lakh of the total 3.09 crore finding themselves stateless. Utterly, disatisfied with the flawed procedure the officials who did the exercise called for another. The politicians of the Assam’s ruling class first cheered for the process but the results disappointed them which made the state government dismiss the results of the process and to go for an overhaul. So, basically the whole process is now redundant with the 1224 crore rupees literally thrown into a dust bin.
The Indian economy has been reeling under severe distress ever since the act of demonetization that the government launched in November 8th, 2016. The government at the center seems to have neglected the fact that the 500 and 1000 rupee notes that they banned within one night was 86% of the whole currency in circulation and a country where 70% of the population was below poverty line and over half of the population illiterate. The poor who managed their households with daily wages had saved it in the form of these two high denomination notes which became a piece of paper within one night. Thanks to demonetization and various other mismanagement done to the economy, the fastest growing economy has ceased to grow. The recent IMF and World Bank data forecasts a grim picture of Indian economy and the irony is IMF lauded the demonetization process when it was launched. The unemployment rate of the country is at a 45 year high. When the citizens themselves are finding it hard to live in their own country, how much of immigrants can the country take? and how the money being spent for an act like NRC for the whole country would end up?
The Hidden Agenda
Home minister of India, Amit Shah, in a speech before he became the home minister in 2019 says that, the NRC is to be implemented after CAA and that all immigrants except Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs will be thrown to the sea. He was the same person who introduced the CAA in the parliament and the mastermind behind NRC exercise in Assam. He has also said that NRC will be implemented to the whole country. So why is that besides these three communities, christians, parsi and Jain got included in the CAA list?
According to the present ruling party, BJP’s ideological head RSS (whose worker Godse being revered to as ‘patriot’ by his follower, was behind Mahatma Gandhi’s death), their enemies are muslims, christians and communists. This is clearly stated in one of the RSS ideology guru V.D Savarkar’s essays. Recently, the ruling dispensation had run a campaign to give V D Savarkar, the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour. So, its no secret what the real intentions are behind NRC and CAA.
So the question lingers why christians are included in the list of CAA? The country of India has been a fertile ground for mob lynchings which has seen an exponential spike from 2014 after the current ruling dispensation took over the reigns. Among which, muslims and dalits (lower caste) found themselves to be the victims. The data shows that christians were also at the receiving end in some cases while all cases had the culprits following an extremem right wing ideology of Hindutva. So, the only credible explanation is that fearing international condemnation christians were included in the list while muslims, as islamophobia and muslim hatred is paying rich dividends for electoral gains for right wing parties in parts of Europe and US, is an easy target.
With 2019, electoral victory the extreme right wing hindutva has firmed up its hold on India. With fear running deep among minorities of the country for a long time, fear became hopelessness which paved way for numbness followed by anger that can be seen in all parts of India. If the electoral victory was a reliable phenomenon is another important question which engenders another indepth article while for now, India is burning and the writer of the article not knowing whether he or she will be there to right another article after this. As we minorities of this country is fighting for our rights when hopes get dashed by majoritarian agenda reminiscent of Hitler and his Nazi regime when they went on a rampage of ethnic cleansing, we, indian minorities has nothing but words of our father of the nation on our lips:
‘Do or Die’. — Mahatma Gandhi (1942, Quit India Movement)
