THE UNABATED WAVE OF NATIONWIDE protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and, more recently, the National Population Register has proven to be a most interesting turning point in India’s democracy. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance government scored a political point by getting the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill passed smoothly, it had not anticipated what would follow. The opposition parties, too, were taken unawares by the deep ferment that had been building up against the legislation.
The protests initially were confined to the northeastern States when the dubious connection between the CAA and the NRC began to unfold. The BJP tried to play it down as a minor hurdle, assuaging its north-eastern constituents, especially in Assam, that their concerns would be addressed in the legislation. The “minority-majority” binary that the BJP sought to create did not work. The Bill amending the Citizenship Act, 1955, was passed, despite the message that it was a highly socially divisive and sectarian one. But the game plan fell apart as protests spilled over from one State to the other, with widespread participation from all communities, including those that stood to benefit from the sectarian CAA. The CAA provides for the legalisation and naturalisation of citizenship of illegal migrants from Hindu, Christian, Jain, Parsi, Sikh and Buddhist communities who, as religious minorities, had fled persecution from three countries, namely, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Apart from being openly sectarian and ultra vires of the Constitution vis-a-vis the core principle of equality of all persons, the Bill conveniently ignored the claims of many other refugees from other neighboring countries who had made India their home.
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