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January 30, 2019

With the Citizenship Bill, India just took a turn to becoming a religion-based State | Abheek Barman

The Times of India

With the Citizenship Bill, India just took a turn to becoming a religion-based State

January 10, 2019, 11:20 pm IST in Folk Theorem 
On Tuesday, January 8, GoI shoved a Bill to amend India’s 1955 citizenship law through the Lok Sabha. It’s a small step downhill from the world’s largest democracy to a possible ‘Hindutva-Pakistan’. The tweak makes it simple for illegal Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Parsi, Jain and Buddhist immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan to become citizens. The original law doesn’t allow citizenship for illegals. It says, immigrants must be here 11 years to become Indians. The change fast-forwards citizenship for non-Muslims to six years.
Faith is a Fine Invention
All nation states are founded on some story. In our parts, four men — a Punjabi called Bhai Parmanand, two Bengali contemporaries called Rajnarayan Basu and Nabagopal Mitra, and a somewhat younger Maharashtrian called Vinayak Damodar Savarkar — churned up a prime concoction 100 years ago. They said religion was the most fundamental thing about people, who were the ‘atoms’ of a nation. Faith was the basis of national identity. Therefore, Hindus and Muslims couldn’t live together. Each faith had to have its own nation. QED.
By 1923, Savarkar was asking in his book, Hindutva, “Can we recognise these [converted] Mohammedans as Hindus?” And so on and so forth, till he concludes that the only people who qualify as Indians are those whose birth and faith originate here. That rules out Indian-born Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews because their beliefs were born someplace else.
What goes around, comes around. The year Hindutva was published, Muhammad ‘Allama’ Iqbal, a poetphilosopher-barrister, was knighted by the British India administration. In 1930, as Muslim League president, he said in Allahabad, “I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims….”
Iqbal imagined such a State, and perhaps a similar one in Bengal, would give Muslims political heft to resist Hindu bullying. He, who had written ‘Saare Jahan Se Achha, Hindostan Hamara’, couldn’t contemplate two nations after British India. That idea came from a young Cambridge University graduate, Rahmat Ali, who cleverly mashed up Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sind and Balochistan, to coin the word ‘Pakistan’ three years after Iqbal’s speech.
By 1940, another Anglicised barrister, worried about the fate of Muslims in Hindu-dominated India, argued, “Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions…. It is a dream that Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality.”
Like Savarkar and Co, Muhammad Ali Jinnah insisted a multi-faith nation was impossible — so, two faiths, two nations. Five years later, Bhimrao Ambedkar, surprisingly, concurred. The idea that Hindu and Muslim could cohabit was “an empty sermon, a mad project, to which no sane man would agree”.
Rx: A Strong Constitution
India’s founding fathers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Kripalani, Abul Kalam Azad and — above all — Mohandas Gandhi, were determined to prove Ambedkar, Jinnah and Savarkar wrong. So, they wrote a secular Constitution, guaranteeing the right of people to practice any faith of their choice and equality before law. Administration can’t discriminate on faith. Exclusion bad, inclusion good.
January’s citizenship rules tries to bury that ideal, making religion a marker for Indian-ness, excluding Muslims immigrants from citizenship, resurrecting Savarkar and Jinnah. The excuse: our neighbours hound non-Muslims.
Really? After a brief lurch towards Islamism, in 2010, Bangladesh’s courts ensured that secularism, written in its 1972 constitution, must be enforced. Its Hindu population trebled from 3% in 1974 — after liberation from Pakistan — to 10% in 2011. After India and Nepal, Bangladesh hosts most Hindus globally.

Pakistan is not just an Islamic State, but a Sunni Muslim one. It persecutes Ahmadiyas, Shias and Sufis. Imambaras, Shia places of worship, are a favourite target of bombers during prayers. Will the Narendra Modi government allow these ‘Islamic’ minorities into India too? If the Bill is about sheltering people persecuted for being in the religious minority, will India let in the Rohingyas from Myanmar too? Fat chance.
The lurch towards a ‘Hindutva-Pakistan’ is possibly illegal. In 1973, a 13-judge bench of the Supreme Court produced India’s most significant ruling. The ‘Kesavananda Bharati’ judgment, it said that no government can fiddle with the ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution. However you define this core, equality before law and freedom of worship tops every list.
But this attempt to ignite bigotry will scar lives and property. Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram, mostly with BJP or BJP-linked administrations, are boiling over with rage. Each is a cauldron of ethnic, religious and tribal loyalties, now incensed by the idea of encroaching ‘outsiders’. Regularising (non-Muslim) illegals is anathema here. The northeast states account for 24 Lok Sabha seats, which the BJP covets for polls later this year. It can kiss goodbye to that.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.