On 9th December, the home minister of this country, Amit Shah, introduced the bill in
the Parliament, in the lower house of the Parliament.
And on December 11th, two days later, the law was passed in the upper house, which is
the Rajya Sabha.
So, the Citizenship Amendment Act right now excludes — like you said, excludes Muslims,
particularly.
And six other communities — immigrants from six communities have been allowed citizenship
under this act.
No explanation has been given why these six communities have been allowed and why Muslims
have been excluded.
And this goes completely against the tenets of the kind of plurality and diversity that
exists in India and a number of us grew upwith.
So, it completely goes — it’s unconstitutional and illegal.
And even though Amit Shah, the home minister of the country, said in the Parliament that
it has the endorsement of 130 crore people of India, the protests that have broken out
in various parts in the country, including Jamia Millia Islamia, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, in Guwahati, in Tamil Nadu — there are protests
all over the country right now.
Twenty-four — students from 24 universities in India are out there protesting against this act.
So that the government has not been kind to the criticism or the debate or the dissent
that has come up regarding this act, and most of the protesters have been met with police violence.
There is police brutality all over.
Yesterday and day before, there have been various incidents in Jamia Millia Islamia University.
Yesterday, students protesting at IIT — at IIM Ahmedabad were also detained.
The same goes in West Bengal.
The same — a similar thing happened in Tamil Nadu.
So, I think the country is burning right now, and nobody is ready to accept this kind of
sectarian law that the government has passed, with a complete Islamophobic agenda in mind.
I also want to say that at this point it’s important to recall that the current political
party in power, Bharatiya Janata Party, they had stated this in their manifesto in the
2014 general elections and this time, in May 2019 general elections, that this is what
they’re going to pass.
And because they have always had the agenda of creating India into a Hindu country, the
Hindu Rashtra, this is a step forward in that direction and breaking the secularism that
we all grew up with in this country.
Modi — first of all, Narendra Modi has been a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
which is the parent body — RSS, which is the parent body of the current political party
in power, in BJP.
RSS, one of the main tenets of RSS is Hindutva, which is to make India into a Hindu country.
So they’ve always been Islamophobic.
Modi, as the chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, he was the chief minister when several
people were massacred, all of them Muslims.
Two thousand people were killed in various capacities.
There was no investigation.
People who were involved in it had direct — had direct involvement with the political
party in power at that time, which was, again, BJP.
And there were lots of other affiliated organizations with the RSS who were involved in it.
There have been several, several documentations to prove that.
Moving from his chief ministership from Gujarat to his journey as the prime minister, he has
constantly been saying things which have been Islamophobic in nature.
And even now, yesterday, while Prime Minister Modi is campaigning in a state called Jharkhand,
which is poll-bound, he has said — responding to the protests, he has said that you can
make out from the kind of attire the people are protesting, that who they are, and which
is a direct reference to the attire that the Muslim community wears.
And that is, again — in a poll-bound state, he has started — he is again trying to create
this kind of communal divide between people.
So, I would like to place this on record that this — while globally we are talking about
several autocrats, the whole idea of the global Islamophobic trend that is going on, there
hasn’t been enough critique of Narendra Modi to be seen in that light, particularly
because he’s been making all these foreign trips.
He was recently in United States also with the “Howdy Modi” campaign.
I think this agenda has constantly been there.
There have also been several investigative reports.
I have also done one where the RSS, the Hindu body behind BJP, had been trafficking several
children from northeast India and taking them to Hindu seminaries in other parts of India
to indoctrinate them in the Hindutva ideology, so that — and they are told how Muslims
are the invaders, Christians are the invaders, and how to fight them and how they are rapists.
So, this kind of narrative has been propagated in the reporters’ columns, and Narendra
Modi has been at the helm of this press.
As of now, I would say that even though India has a democratically elected leader, we are
in a democracy under a dictator.
So we are not a democracy.
We are only a democracy for the privileged, upper-caste Hindu in this country, and none
of the other communities that have existed in India for so many years.