Today, Explained - India's Muslim ban

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

The second-largest Muslim nation in the world just got closer to becoming a Hindu state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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India is a very big country. The second biggest in terms of population. It's also home to the second largest Muslim population in the whole world. And that's why the citizenship amendment India's parliament passed yesterday isn't going over very well. The amendment simplifies the path to citizenship for Hindu refugees from neighboring countries. A lot of people, though, are saying what that actually amounts to is a Muslim ban. We called up Neha Massey in New Delhi to explain. She covers India for The Washington Post and says

this legislation is just one part of the ruling BJP party's master plan. So this is a part of the BJP's vision for India as a Hindu state, as a country which Hindus can call their homeland. So tell me what's in the final passed version of this bill. What does it say? So the current bill that was passed will make a fundamental change to India's citizenship law, which will include for the first time ever religion as a criteria for nationality. So the bill says that minorities Hindus, Christians, Parsis,

Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. So six religions will be afforded an easier path to citizenship if they have come to India illegally or without papers or have overstayed their visas by 2014. This does not include Muslims and of course does not include three other India's neighbors including China, Burma and Sri Lanka which have persecuted minorities which include Muslims. So that's where the controversial aspect of the bill lies. So I think that might be confusing to people. You're dealing with three countries, six religions, excluding a bunch of other countries, and even Hindus from those other countries. Why? Well, I think one assessment is that the three countries mentioned will cover most of the potentially illegal immigrants who will be

Hindus. So majority of those will be from these three countries, particularly Bangladesh. As to the other part of the question that why does it exclude the other countries, because if the other countries like Burma or Sri Lanka were to be included, the minorities there include Muslims. So that is why the intent of this bill is being questioned that it is discriminatory, as it excludes specific countries where Muslims are a minority. So if the government wants to provide amnesty to persecuted minorities in the neighborhood, it should have ideally included all other countries. So to be clear here, this bill that passed in India this week is great if you're a Hindu

immigrant from three countries and bad if you're a Muslim immigrant from a number of countries. That would be accurate. And it's clear that this isn't an accident, that this was the design of the bill? This was asked repeatedly to the Home Minister during the debate in Parliament, and there was no clear answer to why other countries have been left out while these have been included, why specific religions have been named and others not named. But the ruling Hindu nationalist government says its bill does not discriminate against Muslims. This bill will not harm even a little bit, any minority, especially our Muslim brothers and sisters who live in this country.

Because this bill only gives citizenship, it doesn't take it away from anybody. In this bill, they are targeting a community without naming it. It violates the basic structure of the constitution. It is divisive and exclusive. It has consequences that you can't even imagine. And this is part of your political strategy. So outside of India, people are framing this as a Muslim ban.

Does it look like that inside India? Well, so it is more complicated than that. And I think there is definitely a difference from Mr. Trump's Muslim ban. Here, the ban is actually a form of exclusion. And in light of possible future actions of the government, it has deepened concerns that Muslims, citizens, current citizens of the country will be reduced to second class citizens without any rights. I wonder if the government here was intending to limit Muslim citizenship and Muslim immigration in some way, did they intentionally complicate the bill so it didn't look that way? Well, it's hard to state someone else's intent here. And of course, these are questions that will get challenged in court. In fact, earlier this morning, a constitutional challenge has already been filed against the bill,

arguing that it goes against Article 14, which grants everyone equality before law. Might anything come of that challenge? It will take some time. Legal challenges are long drawn affairs, particularly in India. And there will be several other challenges coming up as well. So it won't be very soon. What other opposition did it face as it made its way through the legislature and passed this week? So apart from the opposition in parliament, there have been protests in the northeast, particularly, which have turned violent today. Thousands of people have defied the curfew to come out. Internet has been suspended. Many here in Assam see the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill as a clear message from the Hindu nationalist government

that they are second-class citizens. The government, what are they doing? They are trying to make us minority in our own very state, in our own very religion by giving citizenship to Bangladeshis. So there is a lot of violence that is going on there. And in the rest of the country, there have been civil society protests that have been organized. People have written letters to the president and prime minister urging them to withdraw the bill.

People have also declared that if this is passed and if there is a nationwide registry next, they will refuse to submit papers in solidarity with Muslims or declare themselves Muslims. So the response has been widespread. Of course, there is also a segment of the population that supports the BJP's move and celebrated the passing of this bill. In a country of 1.3 billion people, do you have any sense of how many people support this legislation? That's a very hard question to answer, unfortunately. What is the measure of support that we would use to do that? If we see electoral success as a measure of popularity for the government's action, then yes, it would be construed that because Mr. Modi came back in power earlier this year with a bigger majority than he had. And all of these proposals were part of the party's manifesto. and he's spoken about them during the campaign. So in that way, yes, it does enjoy popularity. However, if you look at, you know, the percentage of votes that the BJP won across the country, it's still within 30 to 40%, depending on

different regions. So that also shows that a lot of the country did not vote for the BJP or Mr. Modi. Tell me about Modi's vision for India right now. So Mr. Modi is from the BJP. They view India's history as a series of humiliations, first by Muslim rule under the Mughals and then of course by the British colonial empire. And for them, their aim or goal is to redress that by reclaiming the glory of the ancient Hindu civilization. So for them, India's secular polity, India's founders that envisioned a secular state and constitution is something that they seek to undo. So apart from this Muslim ban, how is he going about achieving

this vision for India? Right. So in his second term, the government has lost no time in implementing its larger vision or plan. So in August, soon after being elected, it revoked Kashmir, which is a Muslim-majority region. It revoked Kashmir's semi-autonomous status. India has flooded Jammu and Kashmir with tens of thousands of extra troops and police. The result, an atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension. And since then, Kashmir has not gone back to normalcy, if I can call it that. The second thing which happened soon after the Kashmir decision was the Supreme Court verdict on the Ram Temple. This is again a longstanding demand which the BJP had promised to fulfill, that a grand Ram Temple will be built where once a mosque stood.

They believe the nearby 16th century Babri Mosque was built by a Mughal emperor after destroying a temple on the exact spot where God Ram was allegedly born. Frenzied mobs tore down the mosque, sparking deadly riots and driving a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. And then, of course, the latest one has been the passing of the citizenship bill. What's next in this plan? There are two other things that are likely to come up next. One is the citizenship registry, which has to be seen in conjunction with this bill. So if that happens, then all 1.3 billion people of the country will have to prove

that they are citizens. However, the terms and conditions and what will be the parameters are not clear right now. And if that happens, then Muslims who get excluded will not have a path to citizenship again, while the Hindus who may get excluded will be able to find a way back. And the last I would say is, is the Uniform Civil Code. So India as a secular country allows different religions to practice their own personal laws. But under a Uniform Civil Code, all religions will, you know, will be governed by a common law and not and not by their personal laws. And how will that sort of serve this mission? The BJP has consistently accused the opposition,

particularly the Congress Party, which has ruled India for most of its 70 years of independence, as pandering and appeasing the Muslim minorities. So the Muslims follow their own personal law, which means that there are certain aspects of their customs that they are allowed to follow, which they won't be allowed to do their customs that, you know, they are allowed to follow, which they won't be allowed to do if the uniform civil code is brought in. Hmm. How soon will these actions in Kashmir, which we've talked about on the show before,

plus turning this mosque into a temple, altering the civil code, how much do these actions serve the end of turning India into a Hindu state? Well, so there are several aspects to that. One is, of course, the legal and the constitutional framework. So India's constitution remains on paper, a secular, a secular republic, so that will be harder to change. For that, they will have to go through a legal framework via the courts because that can be challenged. So that's one aspect of it. But what they can do is bring in legislations like these, which fundamentally change the nature of the republic, even if it's not law. And that's something that a lot of critics of the government as well as columnists have pointed out, that

bills like the Citizenship Amendment fundamentally alter the idea of India that it was founded upon. Nationalism really seems to be trending right now. Is there something uniquely Indian in this push we're seeing to create a Hindu state? Or do you think this is just part of a broad resurgence of identity politics across the world, both? I think it's a bit of both. There is definitely a move across the world towards, you I think it's a bit of both. There is definitely a move across

the world towards, you know, right wing populist leaders who increasingly are showing authoritarian tendencies. But again, in the Indian context, if I were to say, there are also things which are uniquely specific, which mean that India is home to a large number of minorities. So the other is actually not an external threat, which, you know, Mr. Trump has been able to make, for instance, the other in India are actually its own citizens. My name is Farah Nakvi. I am a writer and an activist. And I work on gender rights and minority rights in India. I happen to have a Muslim name so yes I am identified as a Muslim. We have grown up in a very plural in a very diverse country in which we have intermarried

with Hindus and with Christians and have grown up in an extremely happy situation where there has been absolutely no sense of discrimination that one has experienced personally or professionally for that matter. A lot has changed in this country. From 2014, we have seen people being fearful of traveling or revealing their identities on buses and on trains, trying to disguise their identity, if you will. We've seen this kind of atmosphere of hatred growing. People being lynched on the streets, beaten to death by mobs, video recorded and circulated as symbols of triumph. This is what you saw in the antebellum South in America. This is what the universe, what the humanity believes should never ever be allowed to record. We've seen that in India.

There is across the board, among those who consider themselves liberal votaries of this country, who consider themselves people who believe in the idea of India, as India was when it was born, when it was birthed, when we gave ourselves our constitution in 1950. All of us, Hindus and Muslims together, will, yes, there is a steely resolve. We have to fight this and we must fight this. We will fight this. Thanks to Farah Naqvi and Niha Masih for joining us from New Delhi today.

I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained from the District of Columbia. Music .