The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) that India has passed recently is corrosion of secularism that the Supreme Court in S. R. Bommai versus Union of India deemed part of the basic structure of the Constitution. The legislation turns religion into a means of deciding whom to treat as an illegal immigrant — and whom to fast-track for citizenship. The said law, after revocation of Articles 35 A and 370, is another dramatic on-goal by Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) government. The CAB is just another proof of the hate politics that the Modi-Ami duo believes in. The CAB grants citizenship to a host of religious minorities who fled three nearby countries where they may have faced persecution — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan — before 2015. But Muslims get no such protection. Muslims have faced increasing discrimination and violence over the past few years under Modi’s BJP. But the introduction of CAB takes this to a new level. The duo is keen on making India a Hindu nationalist state.
While the Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi thinks that the CAB will show the world India’s compassionate face, the protests in the northeast of the country, particularly in Assam suggest otherwise. The northeast is justified in its apprehension that the CAB opens doors to demographic change in the region. Clearly, the current government wants to destroy the concentration of Muslims in different parts of India. For B.L. Santhosh, general secretary in the BJP, “concentration, not the numbers, of minority population in certain parts of the country was a cause for concern and needed attention.” Nevertheless, CAB heralds the end of a pluralistic and secular India and the fulfilment of the dream of the RSS and its founders like Savarkar. Under BJP, India is turning into a country where state affairs and people’s right to live in it will be decided by the tyranny of the majority.