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DR. RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW

(U.P.)

DR. RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA NATIONAL

LAW UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW (U.P.)

Session- 2020-21

FINAL DRAFT OF

CITIZENSHIP AND EMIGRATION LAW

TOPIC- CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT, 2019: A STEP

TOWARDS UNDOING THE INDIAN SECULAR
DEMOCRACY

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Dr. RAJNEESH KUMAR YADAV DEVASHREE SAHU

Assistant Professor(LAW) Enroll no. -160101061

Dr. RMLNLU Section – A ,Sem-IX

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ACKNOWLWDGEMENT:

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who helped me in this topic. I extend my
sincere acknowledgements to Dr.Rajneesh Kumar Yadav sir who gave me the opportunity to
make a project on the topic “Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019: A step towards undoing
the Indian secular democracy “ I am deeply indebted to him whose help and stimulating
suggestion helped me in choosing this topic. 

I would also like to thank my friends for their constant help and valuable suggestions.

I further extend my thanks to library staff of DR. RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA

NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY who helped me in getting all the materials necessary for
the project.

-Devashree Sahu
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The researcher has followed the doctrinal method for research purposes. The research
is based on secondary sources. Literature review has been done extensively in order to make
a comprehensive presentation.
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Contents
ACKNOWLWDGEMENT:.......................................................................................................2

Research Methodology...............................................................................................................3

INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................5

Socio-political landscape of India..............................................................................................5

National Register of Citizens: The real intent and miseries in Assam.......................................7

Political and constitutional crisis...............................................................................................9

A step towards Hindu Rashtra....................................................................................................9

Diplomatic fallout....................................................................................................................10

Conclusion................................................................................................................................10

BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................10
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INTRODUCTION
India today is at the crossroads of history. The country won independence from the British
colonial rule in 1947. The bedrock of this new independent state was secular democracy.
Secular democracy is characterised by equality, liberty and fraternity. India has been home to
a plural and diverse group of people – linguistic, ethnic and religion – who have coexisted
peacefully. The Constitution of India elaborately spells out its affirmation to the commitment
of secularism and safeguards to protect secular democracy. This helped India tide over many
crises as a young state and become a vibrant democracy, which is celebrated the world over.
However, in the past six years, the secular democracy in India is severely challenged by
rising majoritarianism and supremacism promoted by the ruling dispensation. The
Constitution, which ensures equality and pluralism, is under a relentless assault through
discriminatory policies and impunity enjoyed by supremacists who are targeting the religious
minorities, Dalits, indigenous people and women. Recently, the ruling dispensation in India
pushed and hastily got the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) passed owing to its brute
majority in Parliament. This Act seeks to radically change the nature of Indian democracy
and challenges the very idea of India and all it stands for.

SOCIO-POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF INDIA

In order to understand the serious implications and import of the CAA, it is important to fully
comprehend the socio-political backdrop prevailing in India. The ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) came into power in India in 2014. The BJP with its exclusionary ideology of
Hindutva has to a large extent polarised the Indian society and deepened the fault lines along
religious identities. One has to bear in mind that this agenda was set and took off with the
formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of BJP, in
1925 with the objective of establishing the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), a goal pursued by
BJP in its governance and subsequent policies. Hindu Rashtra, to put simply, is a state
conceived on the concept of supremacy of Hindu religion, race and culture. Madhav
Sadashiv Golwalkar, the most revered ideologue of RSS, in his conception of Hindu Rashtra
based on the hegemony of the ideology of Hindutva elaborates in his book, We or Our
Nationhood Defined: “…the foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture
and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no
idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and
must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country,
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wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less
any preferential treatment – not even citizen's rights.”

The RSS with this divisive agenda has been fortified and backed with a gamut of affiliated
organisations penetrating almost all institutions in public sphere. For example, it has
organisations of farmers, women, university students, groups for indigenous people and caste
with one common agenda of Hindutva. This has helped them create a formidable network of
grassroots workers having an impressive reach out. The RSS indoctrinated members hold
important positions in educational institutions, media houses and bureaucracy. The divisive
agenda, until before 2014 was pushed informally through these institutions. But post
2014, this agenda has gained traction with the state power BJP enjoys. In that sense, the
agenda is pursued with legitimate power.

These supremacist organisations have worked in a concerted manner to popularise

fabricated narratives that portray the religious minorities in a negative light in an
attempt to ‘other’ or marginalise them.

The Muslims are depicted as anti-national, loyal to Pakistan, fanatic, polygamous and
deliberate in increasing their population in order to overtake the Hindu population (The
Telegraph, 2018). History is distorted to spread the myths that Muslim rulers in India
destroyed temples of the Hindus and spelled the dark ages for India while ancient India ruled
by Hindu rulers had a glorious past, which India must strive to regain (Ashraf, 2015).

The narrative related to Christians is dominated by the aggressive drive of the missionaries to
convert the Hindus to Christianity and thus posing a threat to Hindus and Hindu identity. The
supremacist organisations in the past aggressively took up the campaign of ‘ghar wapsi’,
literally meaning returning home, by the vigilante groups to convert non-Hindus into Hindu
religion forcefully. The vigilante enjoyed impunity though this campaign was in violation of
freedom to religion enshrined in the Constitution. The BJP has also brought about anti-
conversion laws, which make it illegal for anyone wanting to convert into any other religion
from Hindu religion out of one’s own free will. The current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, in a
bid to justify ghar wapsi, remarked that, “People may belong to different castes, religions or
regions, but ideologies and values of all Indians are the same. They all have the same
ancestors — those who have laid down their lives for the country (Verma, 2015)”. This
exposes that attempt at homogenising India.
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These divisive narratives are used to spread politics of hatred and political mobilisation
for violence. Various state commissions, which have investigated into communal riots or
religious violence, have found the RSS instrumental in fomenting hatred, instigating and
participating in violence. This violence is explained in the form of the institutionalised riot
system by political scientist Paul Brass who has studied communal riots in India closely.
Brass observes that before elections, in order to polarise the communities and benefit
electorally, riots are engineered (Brass, 2004). Riots are not spontaneous but planned and
the minorities like Muslims and Christians have suffered heavily in these riots in the
forms of displacement, loss of lives and property. Since 2014, the number of communal
riots reported in the media has steadily decreased and other forms of communal violence have
become more prominent (Engineer, Dabhade, Nair, & Pendke, 2019). For example,
minorities are now targeted through mob lynching. Vigilante groups styled as storm troopers
owing to state patronage are fearlessly lynching people to death under the pretext of cow
smuggling or cow slaughter. Muslims were the target of 52 percent of violence centred on
bovine issues over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017) and comprised 84 percent of 25 Indians
killed in 60 incidents. As many as 97 percent of these attacks were reported after the BJP
government came to power in May 2014, and half the cow-related violence – 30 of 60 cases –
were from states governed by the BJP when the attacks were reported (Abraham & Rao,
2017). Cow is sacred to upper caste Hindus and the RSS has carefully constructed it as a
symbol of nationalism. Another pretext of mob lynching is “love jihad”, a derogatory term
given to relationships where the woman is Hindu and the man is Muslim. The violence
is normalised by the state, which takes no concrete action or condemnations to bring the
culprits of these hate crimes to justice.

NATIONAL REGISTER OF CITIZENS: THE REAL INTENT AND MISERIES IN

ASSAM
Apart from physical violence, the ruling dispensation is encouraging violence in the symbolic
and structural forms. Structural violence entails policies, which discriminate against the
minorities. The CAA is one such policy. It seeks to grant accelerated citizenship of India to
migrants – Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan,
Bangladesh and Pakistan who have entered into India on or before 31 December, 2014. As it
is clear, the Muslims are notably excluded in this Act. The Act is based on the premise that
the above mentioned groups are persecuted minorities in the three countries, which give
special status to Islam. Though one recognises persecution of minorities in these countries, it
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is noteworthy that these very countries have other persecuted groups too. For example, the
Shias and Ahmediyas in Pakistan, the Hazaras in Afghanistan and Rohingya Muslims settled
in Bangladesh have been arguably the worst persecuted communities. Ideally, all those are
persecuted anywhere in the world should be granted refuge and citizenship in India on
humanitarian grounds. Discriminating on the grounds of religion defeats the very logic of
such an Act. It is also in violation of the Indian Constitution, which in Article 14, provides for
equality before law. It is clear that India needs a comprehensive legislation regarding
refugees and the CAA is not the solution.

Furthermore, the CAA cannot be viewed in isolation. It assumes significance in the light of
the imminent National Register of Citizens (NRC), which the government has repeatedly
warned will be implemented throughout India. The CAA is a knee jerk reaction of the BJP to
the devastating experience of NRC in Assam, which rendered 1.9 million citizens, mostly
Hindus, stateless. The CAA is a tool devised to grant citizenship to the Hindus excluded from
the NRC in Assam who constitute the support base of BJP. The NRC process would require
each resident in India to produce documents proving that they are citizens of India. Central to
these documents are those, which prove legacy or that their ancestors were Indian citizens
dating back to 1950. The tedious and complex process of NRC so far carried out in the state
of Assam has brought the state on the verge of a humanitarian crisis.

The roots of NRC in Assam can be traced to the British who encouraged migration to Assam
from Bengal and other places in India for cultivation in order to augment their revenue from
agricultural produce. The influx of migrants, mainly Bengali speaking Hindus and Muslims,
was perceived as a threat to the identity and resources of the indigenous groups in Assam.
There was a persistent demand to restrict this migration in Assam. This anti-migration
movement intensified post the formation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, in 1971
when migrants from Bangladesh crossed into the North East India through the porous
border owing to political unrest and violence in East Pakistan. The BJP has steadily
added fuel to this fire by giving unsubstantiated exaggerated figures of Bangladeshi
immigrants in Assam to gain political acceptance in Assam. The BJP made no
distinction in the immigrants on the basis of religion and portrayed as if all immigrants
were Muslims. They termed them as infiltrators – illegal migrants coming with the
intent to create unrest. The BJP added to the intense hatred and hysteria against
Bengali Hindu and Muslim migrants and steadily turned it into an anti-Muslim
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movement. This movement resulted into the Assam Accord of 1985 provided citizenship
for foreigners coming into Assam before March 24, 1971.

The process costing a massive Rs. 16,000 million has rendered 1.9 million residents, mostly
Hindus, stateless and stripped them off their citizenship. The NRC updation, which took over
a decade in Assam, created an unforgivable scramble and paranoia to gather documents to
prove that one’s ancestors were Indian citizens. In this routinely flood ravaged state, where,
like most of India, hospitals and schools are still a dream in remote areas, it is impossible to
get documents to prove birth or ancestry. This unrealistic requirement cost the unlettered and
the poor, across religious lines, their citizenship. The fate of spending the rest of their lives in
detention camps awaits them. Many in Assam committed suicides only in anticipation of
being excluded from the NRC and being torn apart from their loved ones and family. Many
have died in the inhumane conditions that describe the detention centres. One can only
imagine the mammoth task involving incredible financial and human resource required in
replicating this exercise throughout India, which might exclude so many million more
innocent citizens.

POLITICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

The CAA has triggered a constitutional crisis in India. The Constitution and the Citizenship
Act 1955 govern citizenship in India. Citizenship in India is determined on the principle of
jus soli. It means that in order to be an Indian citizen, one must be born in the territory of
India or his/ her parents should be born in India. There is no barrier of religion. However, the
CAA marks a shift from this principle to the principle of jus sanguinis, which is based on
bloodline. The CAA is modeled on the ‘law of return’ as is prevalent in Israel, which believes
Israel is the natural home for Jews from anywhere in the world. The BJP time and again has
reiterated its political position that India is the natural home of Hindus around the world
including in its election manifesto of 2019 (BJP.ORG, 2019). This position and the
subsequent Act, which determines citizenship on the basis of religion, go against the
foundational principle of the Constitution and constitutional morality. This Act will render
Muslims in India as second class citizens and result in endless anxiety not only for Muslims
but all other citizens especially the dispossessed poor who will find it impossible to produce
such a labyrinth of documents. This will put millions of citizens at the risk of being stateless.
The CAA may bring some succour to the followers of the six religions mentioned in the Act
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but they will have to first lie that they are not Indian citizens but have migrated from the three
countries.

A STEP TOWARDS HINDU RASHTRA

Arguably this is a decisive step towards establishment of a Hindu Rashtra. After the
abrogation of Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, the CAA
indicates the aggressive shift to the Right and majoritarianism. This Act is a grim reminder of
the Nuremberg Laws, which discriminated against the Jews. This Act also institutionalises
and legitimises discrimination against Muslims in India. Seeking to introduce ethno-
nationalism, the Act spells a death knell to a multicultural society.

DIPLOMATIC FALLOUT
The Act has attracted international attention and concern. The brute and violent manner in
which the government handled widespread protests led by students and youth against the Act
has been invoked great concern and even condemnation worldwide. Students on campuses of
prestigious universities like Oxford, Harvard, MIT and Yale have staged protests in solidarity
of the students targeted by police brutally. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cancelled his
visit to India due to the ongoing protests in Guwahati. Bangladesh Foreign Minister AK
Abdul Momen too cancelled his visit to India to demonstrate that Bangladesh was not happy
with the accusations made by Indian Home Minister Amit Shah that Bangladesh persecutes
its minorities. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet has
urged the government to respect the citizens’ right to protest peacefully.

CONCLUSION
The CAA coupled with the NRC dents constitutional morality and betrays the very idea of
India, which was founded on composite nationalism and shared identity. India was envisaged
as a secular country, home to followers of all religions and also atheists. But the ruling
dispensation, by hastily getting this Act passed without democratic consultation, has
undermined democratic institutions in India. It is reimagining India as a Hindu Rashtra with
citizenship defined along lines of ethno-nationalism. This Act is not the first and by no means
will be the last attempt to further the agenda of Hindu Rashtra. One can anticipate many such
moves meant to keep the hatred against Muslims simmering. The ruling dispensation will be
reinventing tools to keep the xenophobia brewing. However, this divisive politics will only
hurtle India onto the treacherous road of relentless anxiety, uncertainty and injustice. It will
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expose million of its own citizens against the vagaries of statelessness. The pressure it will
exert on the seams of the already existing fault lines in India might result into spiralling
violence and unrest for decades to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham, D., & Rao, O. (2017, June 28). Indiaspend, https://archive.indiaspend.com/cover-
story/86-dead-in-cow-related-viole…, accessed on December 22, 2019

Ashraf, A. (2015, November 20). Scroll.in., from Scroll.in:

https://scroll.in/article/769463/we-will-never-know-the-number-of-templ…, accessed on
OCTOBER 22, 2020.

BJP.ORG. (2019, April 8), from BJP.Org: https://www.bjp.org/en/manifesto2019, accessed

on OCTOBER 22, 2020.

Brass, P. R. (2004). Development of an Institutionalised Riot System in Meerut City, 1961 to

1982. Economic and Political Weekly .

Engineer, I., Dabhade, N., Nair, S., & Pendke, S. (2019, February 12). Sabrang India, from
Sabrang India: https://sabrangindia.in/article/communal-violence-locating-role-state-a…,
accessed on OCTOBER 24, 2020.

The Telegraph. (2018, August 5). Retrieved OCTOBER 23, 2020, from The Telegraph:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/sinister-myth/cid/1078310, accessed on OCTOBER
23, 2020.

Verma, L. (2015, february 16),The Indian Express,

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/from-up-stage-bhag…, accessed on
OCTOBER 24, 2020.
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