Citizenship Amendment Act: An act of violence?
Citizenship Amendment Act: An act of violence?
WRITTEN BY M. SUDHIR SELVARAJ and SHARIK LALIWALA
10 April 2020
In December, the Indian Parliament passed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The act seeks to provide fast-track Indian citizenship to Hindu, Jains, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist and Christians who have immigrated from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, fleeing religious persecution.
The only religious group excluded is the Muslim community despite the fact that Muslim minorities such as Ahmedis and Shias in Pakistan, and Hazaras in Afghanistan face wide-spread religious persecution. Moreover, the deliberate selection of three Islamic countries of the Indian subcontinent – while ignoring vulnerable communities such as Tamils in Sri Lanka, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar – makes the anti-Muslim intent of the law quite clear. For example, historian Mukul Kesavan writes “couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, [CAA’s] main purpose is the de-legitimization of Muslim citizenship.”
When read alongside the impending National Registrar of Citizens (NRC), CAA becomes a tool to either deny citizenship to Muslim residents of India or push them towards “second-class citizenship”. Legally speaking, it violates Article 15 of the Indian Constitution which prohibits the Indian state from discriminating against Indian citizens on the basis of “religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them”. A series of petitions challenging the law for these reasons are pending before the Supreme Court.
The Citzenship Amendment Act is an addition in this stream of structural violence against Muslims. The anti-Muslim bias of the law is quite consistent with the ruling BJP’s ideological moorings directly inspired by its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
More recently, the union government has changed its stance on NRC and rather emphasised on creating a registrar of residents, which aims to introduce NRC from backdoors. Few weeks after protests against CAA, NRC and NPR began in December 2019, a group of Muslim women sat on an indefinite sit-in protest at Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim-dominated locality in New Delhi. This courageous act was replicated throughout the country and several dozens of such sit-in sites blossomed. In the violence that ensued from counter-protesters in the last weeks of February 2020, over 50 people died, 2/3rd of them Muslims, as police remained a mute spectator.
The Citizenship Amendment Act must be considered a form violence, particularly “structural violence” – a term introduced by Johan Galtung, a prominent political scientist in the late-1960s. For Galtung, structural violence is not committed by an identifiable person but rather "is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances". Likewise, CAA coupled with either NRC or registrar of residents, will create asymmetric structures of rights between non-Muslims and Muslims.
In terms of their political voice, Muslims are already quite under-privileged in India. At present, Muslims constitute only 4.5 per cent of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Parliament, well below their share of the Indian population recorded at 14.2 per cent in 2011 Census. In recent years, their representation in state legislative assemblies has consistently gone down coinciding with Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) dominance at national and regional-level politics.
In January 2018, just 0.28% of BJP’s over 1400 legislators across Indian states were Muslims. In a recent article, Adeney and Swenden find “clear evidence of the progressively deteriorating representation” of minorities in the national parliament, cabinet positions and executive committees of larger national parties such as the BJP and the Indian National Congress. They also find an inter-linked increase in representation of Hindus in these institutions.
On top of that, the socio-educational mobility of Muslims worsens impacting the community’s social and economic status. Only 14% of Muslim youth attain a university degree vis-à-vis 18% of Dalit youth, 25% of Hindu OBC youth, and 37% of Hindu upper-caste youth. Compared with Hindu Dalits – one of the most marginalised groups among Hindus – the educational mobility of Muslims is substantially suppressed.
The Citzenship Amendment Act is an addition in this stream of structural violence against Muslims. The anti-Muslim bias of the law is quite consistent with the ruling BJP’s ideological moorings directly inspired by its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). For RSS and all its affiliate groups, Muslims are foreign enemies who have dominated over Hindus in their “homeland”. For example, M.S. Golwalkar, a Hindu Nationalist ideologue, wrote in his book ‘We or our Nationhood Defined’ in 1939:
Outsiders [are] bound by all the codes and conventions of the Nation, at the sufferance of the Nation and deserving of no special protection, far less any privilege or rights. There are only two courses open to the foreign elements [Christians and Muslims], either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race.
Galtung urges us to see structural violence of ethno-religious nationalism as equal to physical violence because in the eyes of the victim, it doesn’t matter how they are disadvantaged but that they are disadvantaged. What this analysis shows is that while the method differs, the aggressor and the harm felt remains the same.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
M. Sudhir Selvaraj is a PhD candidate at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London. Sharik Laliwala is an independent researcher focusing on contemporary Gujarat’s socio-political history and more recently on Muslims in north India. Image credit: CC BY-NC 4.0/Wikipedia Commons.