FACTORS BEHIND THE VIOLENCE ON CITIZENSHIP (AMENDMENT) ACT (CAA) AND NATIONAL REGISTER OF CITIZENS (NRC)

Despite assurances by the BJP that the new citizenship law will not affect the Indian Muslims, there have been widespread agitations against the controversial legislation.

- Amulya Ganguli

There are two reasons for this. One is that the government is not trusted and the other is the belief that the ruling party is engaged in an elaborate subterfuge to trap and hound the Muslims.

While their exclusion from the citizenship law even as it includes Hindus and five other communities is intended to let the Muslims know their outlier status so far as being a citizen is concerned, they will be very much in focus when the enumeration of all citizens begins for the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) has to be seen, therefore, in tandem with the NRC. Ostensibly, the latter’s objective is to smoke out the illegal Muslim immigrants or “termites”, as Union home minister Amit Shah called them, from Bangladesh or Myanmar or wherever.

But, during the process of detection, all the Muslims living in India will come under the scanner of the investigative agencies. Hence, the panic among them for securing whatever documents they can to prove their identity.

Understandably, the most scared among them are the poor and the illiterate, who may not have them. While the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and Christians can take recourse to the CAA to acquire citizenship rights, the Muslims cannot do so.