India parties stage protests against citizenship law

India’s main opposition party and other political parties staged protests in the capital and other major cities on Monday against a contentious new citizenship law, a day after prime minister Narendra Modi defended the legislation at a rally in New Delhi and accused the opposition of pushing the country into a ‘fear psychosis’.

 

Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi led a silent protest in New Delhi along with other senior party leaders. Around 2,000 people joined the protest at the Raj Ghat, a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, where the party demanded ‘protection for the constitution and the rights of people enshrined in it’, reports The New York Times online.

Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to India’s streets to call for the revocation of the law, which critics say is the latest effort by Modi’s government to marginalize the country’s 200 million Muslims.

Other protests were held across the country on Monday, including in the southern cities of Bengalore and Kochi.

Twenty-five people have  been killed nationwide since the citizenship law was passed in parliament earlier this, reports AFP.

Islamic groups, the opposition and others at home and abroad fear this forms part of Modi’s aim to remould the country as a Hindu nation, something his government denies.

Demonstrations have been largely peaceful but protesters have also hurled rocks and torched vehicles, while heavy-handed police tactics including the storming of a Delhi university a week ago have fuelled anger.

Indian authorities have cut mobile internet access in places and imposed emergency laws banning assemblies.

Most of the deaths have occurred in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 20 per cent of the state’s 200 million people are Muslim.

Police also resorted to a crackdown of sorts in the state by seizing some shops in the town of Muzaffarnagar. The crackdown, which began Sunday, came after the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, vowed Friday to ‘take revenge’ against people who had damaged public property during the protests by seizing their assets.

Authorities across India have taken a hard-line approach to quell the protests. They’ve evoked a British colonial-era law banning public gatherings, and internet access has been blocked at times in some states. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has asked broadcasters across the country to refrain from using content that could inflame further violence.

The communication shutdown has mostly affected New Delhi, the eastern state of West Bengal, the northern city of Aligarh and the entire northeastern state of Assam.

Undeterred, protesters have continued to rally throughout the country.

The new law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims.

Protests against the law come amid an ongoing crackdown in Muslim-majority Kashmir, the restive Himalayan region stripped of its semi-autonomous status and demoted from a state into a federal territory in August.

The demonstrations also follow a contentious process in Assam meant to weed out foreigners living in the country illegally. Nearly 2 million people, about half Hindu and half Muslim, were excluded from an official list of citizens — called the National Register of Citizens, or NRC — and have been asked to prove their citizenship or else be considered foreign.

India is building a detention center for some of the tens of thousands of people who the courts are expected to ultimately determine have entered illegally. Modi’s interior minister, Amit Shah, has pledged to roll out the process nationwide.

The protests against the law began in Assam, the center of a decades-old movement against migrants, before spreading to predominantly Muslim universities and then nationwide.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net