India protests: The dream of a secular India is dying
Mass protests have spread across India delivering a remarkable, and unexpected blow, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi leader of the Hindu nationalist BJP. Up until now Modi has seemed unstoppable defying expectations to win a thumping a majority in the May parliamentary elections. This victory owed a great deal to a terrorist attack in February this year in the state of Jammu and Kashmir – subject to a long running territorial dispute with Pakistan. Modi’s forceful response that led to skirmishes with Pakistan let him pose as the man who stood up for Indian security. In the elections rumblings of discontent over the economy were swept aside in a tide of jingoism.
Following this success, Modi – emboldened, unleashed, convinced a strong man image pays, and perhaps hoping to distract from ongoing economic troubles – has implemented measures that seem little less than a concerted attempt to reshape India along Hindu supremacist lines, and sideline Indian Muslims who make up 14% of the country. In pursuit of this he is not afraid to resort to deeply authoritarian, near dictatorial tactics.
Jammu and Kashmir – India’s only Muslim majority state – saw its autonomous status guaranteed by the 1954 amendment to the Indian Constitution, Article 370, revoked. This was accompanied by the arrest of leading Kashmiri politicians, troops being sent in to crush protests, and all communications with the outside world including the internet blocked across the state.
The recent Citizenship Amendment Act ostensibly offers a pathway to Indian citizenship to persons who entered India illegally fleeing religious persecution. However, these protections only extend to Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains – Muslims are baldly and deliberately excluded. The offer also only extends to migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan i.e. Muslim majority countries, migrants from other neighbours like China and Burma are not affected. The implicit message is that where Muslims rule, minorities are in danger – and that Muslims cannot be victimised. Never mind the Rohingya fleeing genocide in neighbouring Burma, or Shi’ites and Ahmadis that face persecution by Sunni extremists.
Another key development, deeply linked to the new law, has been the mass citizenship tests taking place in the north-eastern state of Assam. The state has been home to many Bengali refugees since the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Local resentment of the refugees resulted in plans in the 1980s to conduct mass citizenship tests to ferret out illegal immigrants i.e. refugees. However, there were few serious attempts to implement this until this year. Now tests have left roughly 2 million people facing the prospect of being declared non-citizens and deported. Vast camps are being built capable of housing hundreds of thousands of detainees scheduled for deportation. With the new law it seems only Muslims will be affected. Unsurprising in a country where the home minister, Amit Shah, has referred to Muslim migrants as “termites”.
The BJP government seems keen to extend this sinister purge further. On 11 November Shah proclaimed his intent to extend the citizenship tests across the entire country.
However, the Citizenship Amendment Act seems to have been a breaking point. The initial protests concentrated in Assam were in large part fuelled by fears the bill would precipitate an influx of Bangladeshi Hindus. Modi’s response was reflexively authoritarian. Kashmir troops were sent in to quell the protests, resulting in mass arrests and some casualties, and the internet was blocked across the state. That Modi then appealed for calm over Twitter was a grim irony.
Since then the protests have spread and become a wider campaign about whether India will remain true to the promise of a secular state and the values laid out at independence. Protests have spread across the country with hotspots in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and the cities of Delhi and Bengaluru. However, there has been no sign of willingness to make concessions from the government. If anything, the crackdown appears to be intensifying. Many areas are enduring partial shutdowns of internet and mobile phone services and enforcement of Section 144, which bans gatherings of more than four people. Despite this thousands of protestors are still taking to the streets braving arrest. Those arrested include prominent historian and biographer of Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha, who was taken away by the police on live TV.
Far more shocking, however, has been the violence doled out by the police against protestors, particularly Muslims. At Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, one of India’s top universities with a particular mission to educate Indian Muslims, police treated student protesters with particular brutality. One viral video shows police in Delhi drag a young Muslim woman out of a crowd and beat her to the ground with heavy wooden batons, until other Muslim women protect the victim with their bodies. Another popular video shows Mohammad Tameen who claims a policeman shot him in the leg when he was walking past the protests.
Should the protests continue, the situation will become increasingly reminiscent of the Emergency of the 1970s – the last time India’s democracy was rocked by authoritarian leadership and mass demonstrations. Already the similarities are uncanny. In both cases a leader, then Indira Gandhi, now Narendra Modi, has managed to concentrate power in their own hands to an unhealthy degree. Both overwhelmed internal party checks by sheer force of personality. Subsequent military success – Indira’s triumph in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War and Modi’s border clashes – combined with genuine mass popularity then delivered huge popular mandates. Now Modi, like Indira before him, seems determined to play fast and loose with the Indian constitution and to deploy violence to reshape the country according to his vision.
During the Emergency the Indian courts played a huge role in pushing back against Indira’s dictatorial tendencies, and the Citizenship Amendment Act faces judicial challenge in January. However, today the Indian courts seem increasingly supine in the face of government pressure and willing to kowtow to the Hindu nationalist agenda.
Take for example a Supreme Court Ruling in a case concerning the Babri Masjid. The mosque was destroyed by a mob of Hindu nationalists in 1984 who believed that it had been built on the birthplace of Hind god Ram, and that a Hindu temple had stood there before a mosque was built over it. Since then the site of the destroyed mosque has been in political and legal limbo until November this year when the Supreme Court ruled that Hindu beliefs meant they had claim to the land, and ordered the government to build a temple to Ram on it. Whether the courts will find their spine and come to the aid of protestors standing up for a secular tolerant India remains to be seen.