When it comes to the topic of who does and doesn’t belong in India, Union Minister Amit Shah – a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – has never minced words.
“Infiltrators are like termites,” he told a rally of supporters in 2019. “A BJP government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.”
It was a clear dog whistle – everyone in that crowd knew “infiltrators” was code for “Muslims,” 200 million of whom make up India’s most highly persecuted minority group. His comments were foreshadowing: Shah was speaking just months before the government would pass the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a law that fast-tracks citizenship for undocumented Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians – but not for Muslims. In other words, the CAA conditions citizenship on the basis of religion.
The CAA was passed in 2019, stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, and is now finally rearing its head again with its jaws unhinged. In March – on the first day of Ramadan – Prime Minister Modi’s government announced rules for the CAA’s implementation, to the delight of its Hindu nationalist base and to the dismay of India’s allies, human rights groups and international authorities.
Not only will the CAA create a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions – one where millions of Muslims are stripped of their citizenship, rendering them vulnerable to expulsion and mass violence – but it is also a vital step towards Modi’s goal of creating a Hindu ethno-state.
Modi’s supporters in the US scoff at these warnings, arguing that this law does not affect anyone’s citizenship status, but that it’s aimed only at supporting “refugees fleeing religious persecution” from neighbouring states (like the American Lautenberg Amendment). But this claim ignores a few stark realities.
The first is that India has no refugee law; the word “refugee” never appears in the wording of the CAA. Moreover, in a country where few people, regardless of religion, have documentation to prove their citizenship, the CAA most certainly impacts which Indians will be able to gain citizenship documents and which will be treated as outsiders – or, as Home Minister Amit Shah put it, “infiltrators.”
The CAA must also be understood as the project of a government that openly champions the Nazi-inspired ideology of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. This ideology believes India should be a Hindu nation, declaring Muslims as perpetual foreigners who should be subject to disenfranchisement, expulsion and even genocide.