Drawing The Line

Why the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill united northeastern India in protest / Communities

- Richard Kamei And Sabina Y Rahman

On 8 January this year, the Lok Sabha passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which declared that a specified category of undocumented immigrants residing in India—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who hail from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan—would not be treated as illegal immigrants. This implied that only Muslims, atheists and practitioners of indigenous faiths from these countries would be treated as undocumented, making them fit for detention and deportation. In the month that followed, there were widespread protests in India’s northeastern states, where people felt the legitimisation of foreigners would threaten the culture and demography of the indigenous people of the region. On 13 February, the protestors were momentarily victorious, as the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government had to abort the plan to table the bill in Rajya Sabha before parliament was prorogued, causing it to lapse.

But after the BJP’s thumping victory in the 2019 election, the spectre of the bill looms large again, as the party’s manifesto promises its reintroduction and enactment. The contentious bill provides foreigners of the six mentioned faiths a speedier way to obtain citizenship through naturalisation. While the existing Citizenship Act, 1955 mandates that citizenship applicants have to reside in India for a period of 11 years before being naturalised, the proposed amendment would reduce the period to six years for this subset of immigrants. The bill’s blatantly discriminatory provisions violate Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees people the “right to equality before the law and equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.” The bill does not provide a constitutionally sound reason behind its religious basis for determining citizenship.