Guest post by HASRATEIN : A QUEER COLLECTIVE

On 11 March 2024, four years after the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, the BJP government notified the CAA rules. Continuing their symbolic violence in creating a Hindu Rashtra, the notification came at the beginning of the month of Ramadan, held to be holy by Muslims across the world. As part of their election agenda, this marks another step to consolidate the Hindu vote bank which has been fed on anti-Muslim proposals and propaganda machines. While CAA apologists are using refugee rhetoric to spread hatred against Muslims in the country, the CAA rules show the bureaucratically stringent proofs demanded (Schedule IA and IB) which will ensure many who attempt to claim citizenship through the Act will be rendered de facto stateless.

CAA 2019 is an amendment to India’s citizenship law that fast tracks citizenship acquisition for non-Muslim minorities of neighboring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This includes Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and Christians from these three countries. An earlier version of the bill with this logic was passed by Lok Sabha in 2016 but did not get cleared by Rajya Sabha. The Act introduces anti-secular provision by making religion a criterion in citizenship acquisition. CAA 2019 fulfills many agendas of Hindu nationalism at the same time.

First, it demonizes the neighboring states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh by fuelling jingoism and justifying securitarian logic.

Second, it promotes demographic irredentism through the restoration of, specifically, the Hindu population to Hindutva’s idea of India as Akhand Bharat by trying to achieve their “ghar vapsi”.

Third, it creates a hierarchy of citizenship pathways by creating a distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim refugees/migrants.

The CAA 2019 is fully arbitrary as a refugee policy, which is what the popular right-wing justification of the Act claims it to be, although  BJP itself denies this in the parliament. The Act leaves out Afghanis, Hazaras, Shia Muslims, Ahmadiyas, Bangladeshi Bengali Muslims, and Rohingyas. Many of these communities are routinely attacked by Hindu nationalists. Some like Bangladeshi Bengali Muslims and Rohingyas are specifically called ‘infiltrators’ and ‘termites’ and their living conditions are destroyed in urban spaces.

CAA also leaves out Bhutanese Lhotshampas, Tibetans, and Sri Lankan Tamils whose agonies continue. By considering only religious persecution as an executive priority, the Act sidelines the persecution along the lines of political beliefs, gender, and sexuality, as well as migration occurring through economic and environmental displacement. This continues with the ruling party members disallowing any discussion of a secular asylum bill in the parliament. While BJP ministers stated in the CAA parliamentary discussions in 2019 that the goal of CAA was to “undo partition”, their actions point to creating a situation of internal partition by legally sanctioning an apartheid state which makes Muslims both in principle and practice second-class citizens. It is necessary to reject CAA and fight for a comprehensive asylum law.

With CAA 2019, it is also important to fight against both the 2003 and 1986 amendments to citizenship law. The 2003 amendment was also carried out by a BJP government with the rationale of “detection, deletion and deportation”. The amendment introduced and defined the notion of an “illegal migrant” as a person who can be jailed or deported. It also made “illegal migrants” ineligible for citizenship by registration or by naturalization which the CAA 2019 continues (except, by introducing the religious criterion, it creates an external binary for undocumented migrants). The amendment also rejected citizenship by birth for children born in India if either parent of the child was an “illegal immigrant”. Similarly, the 1986 amendment, conceived by the Congress government in response to the Assam Accord, cemented citizenship by descent/blood replacing birthright citizenship. Instead of resolving the actual political-economic issues of the region, the government fanned the demands of the xenophobic anti-foreigner groups and made the citizenship law more discriminatory.

CAA also cannot be seen outside the context of majoritarianism which engages in both legislative and everyday violence against Muslims. Working in tandem with Assam NRC and the proposed all-India NRC and NPR, there is a high possibility of CAA’s manufactured inclusion of Hindus while specifically targeting Bengali Muslims/Miyas in Assam and Muslims across the country who will become the primary victims of CAA-NRC plan. In this “chronology” as called by Home Minister Amit Shah, the NRC disenfranchises the Muslims and CAA protects the Hindus left out of NRC through manipulated inclusion. Even though CAA’s core idea was conceived in the 2016 bill itself, there is a strong indication that making it work in conjunction with NRC is a post-Assam NRC rationalization, given the results in the region. Since BJP’s capture of all state institutions, such maliciousness is very likely.

Unlike many groups that are anti-CAA and pro-NRC, it is crucial to reject NRC as a potentially just process in practice or principle. NRC is a document of all “legal” citizens to find out the “illegal” residents who can be identified and deported. In reality, it works as a disenfranchisement mechanism representing the administrative and bureaucratic violence of a documentary regime with the targeted logic of the executive state orchestrated by India’s judiciary and politically mobilized by xenophobic and nationalist movements from both regional and national levels. After the initial NRC of Assam in 1951, very few wanted to conduct the activity again except ethnonationalists with investment in the demographic majority. In 2014, NRC was sought to be updated under the watch of the Ranjan Gogoi-led Supreme Court bench. His own biases in the issue have become visible over the years.  When the then-NHRC special team member Harsh Mander filed a writ petition for improving the conditions of six detention centres in Assam, Gogoi decided to get Mander recused from the case and acted like the executive to force deportations of those in detention centres. The results of Assam NRC published in August 2019 left out 19,06,657 persons, including 6.90 lakh Bengali Hindus and 4.89 lakh Bengali Muslims who are yet to be given the right to appeal. The Foreigners’ Tribunals body which carried out this process marked people as D(doubtful)-Voters in a fundamentally arbitrary and discriminatory way with the burden of proof on the accused themselves. Today, the people are languishing in prisons, and detention centres, with the majority living as second-class members of society without access to ration cards or other social welfare benefits, much of which were denied during the COVID-19 lockdown. Except for parts of Assam, including Barak Valley, and West Bengal, there is very little consciousness around those left out of Assam NRC and progressives around the country have simply ignored this reality. While fighting for those left out of NRC in Assam, similar projects across the country have to be thwarted by boycotting any census process that introduces NPR-NRC through a backdoor entry.

The government in 2019 released the Model Detention Manual to construct detention centres in all states, similar to the one operating in Matia, Goalpara since January 2023. By immediately filling it with people, the BJP has shown that it simply wants to worsen the situation of those who were left out of NRC. There are already many prisons that function as makeshift detention camps across the country that the BJP has consistently lied about in RTIs and parliamentary questions. More detention centres will mean higher incarceration rates. All of this shows that despite increased refugee rhetoric, the BJP can only create arbitrary distinctions between migrants. BJP will not only do little to nothing for refugee protection but will significantly threaten the safety of refugees and migrants as well as the largest minority in the country.

At a time when ultranationalism and xenophobia are at their peak, many critics of CAA 2019 and Hindu nationalism have championed their own version of secular nationalism and xenophobia by appeals to context, citizens’ claims on resources, and domestic issues. This has proven a boon to the BJP for appropriating the mandate of refugee rights. This is happening in the context of routine targeting of Bengalis, especially Muslims, who are racialised and demonized. It is urgent to defend and stand in solidarity with the Muslims of the country and fight for migrant justice against the nationalist onslaught simultaneously. The 2019 protests demonstrated the collective resistance of Muslims and other conscientious members of the country. Many who participated are still suffering in jail as undertrials, including JNU’s Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid. It is time to renew that fight. Many Muslims across the country have already started protesting the CAA rules over the last two days and police across states have responded with violence and detention. We strongly condemn the police violence and detention of protestors and appeal to everyone to join the fight against CAA-NRC-NPR in these dark hours.

We, from Hasratein: a queer collective

stand in solidarity with everyone, especially Muslims, fighting against this Hindu nationalist agenda.

We urge all democratic forces to join this struggle against fascism, Islamophobia, and xenophobic nationalism and  to fight:

against the 1986, 2003, and 2019 amendments to citizenship law

for a truly liberatory model of migrant justice and refugee rights.

against Assam NRC.

against the proposed all-India NRC and NPR.

against Model Detention Manual 2019 and detention centres across the country

against the stringent documentary and deportation regime

against insidious use of refugee concerns by the fascist party.

Reject CAA-NRC-NPR in toto.

No human is illegal.

Hasratein: a queer collective can be reached at hasratein.aqueercollective.jnu@gmail.com or DM on Instagram @hasratein.jnu