THE Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of India allows persecuted minorities belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi, Jain, and Christian communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to gain Indian citizenship.

Passed in 2019, it was operationalised through notifying the rules on March 11, 2024 — the eve of Ramazan and the month Pakistan came into being in 1947. India’s supreme court sat over 200-plus petitions against the amendment for being biased and religion-centric, ignoring groups like the Rohingya, Hazaras, and Ahmadis. The court was told by the BJP government that since the law had not been activated, there was no ground for discussing the admissibility of petitions.

India, like every country, has a right to legislate on its affairs, but when it pertains to populations, persecuted or not, in other countries, they also have a right to discuss and question the motives and consequences of such legislation. Let us take Pakistan, for instance; that minorities are treated unequally here is to put it mildly. However, the victims of such unjust treatment outnumber the listed categories of the ‘persecuted’ under the CAA.

Among the Pakistani Hindu populace, the most downtrodden are the scheduled caste communities — Meghwar, Bheel, and Kohli. Are they likely to benefit from the CAA largess? Will the establishment become suddenly empathic and facilitate this political gimmick?

India’s citizenship law may just be a political stunt.

According to veteran constitutional experts like Kapil Sibal and seasoned journalists like Shekhar Gupta and Vir Sanghvi, the amendment requires no proof of persecution other than belonging to the short-listed identities, which boils down to religion. In other words, if you are a Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, or Christian from Pakistan, all you require is a claim of persecution to get citizenship to live a life of security and peace in the ‘heaven’ of communal ‘harmony’ that India under the BJP-RSS combine has become. This presumably is guaranteed regardless of whether one is an indentured Meghwar peasant from Thar, a Brahman seth from Shikarpur, a Sikh trader from Peshawar, or a Lahori Parsi entrepreneur.

Given the resistance that will come from Pakistan and the need to show that the party thrown by the BJP does not go unattended, will India conduct rescue missions like Israel’s ‘Operation Moses’ that shifted Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps in Sudan in 1984?

Will the CAA encourage the ‘A-lister’ countries to improve their treatment of minorities? Every forced conversion, every desecration of a place of worship, and every forced disappearance diminishes our stature and lowers our stock among the comity of nations. India, China, Israel, and the US are no beacons of light when it comes to their rights records either, but their spurts of growth and smart use of geo-economics make them attractive business partners. What do we offer? A lead-augmented wall between us and progress. The populace is actually more at risk of lead poisoning than any external threats.

One must alert readers that the discussion on the amendment has mostly been hypothetical. The CAA may just be a political stunt because its sting was taken out by the cut-off date of Dec 31, 2014. In other words, it is a retroactive piece of legislation, and its probable beneficiaries could only be those seekers of Indian citizenship who have been living in transit camps in India for over a decade. The rules governing the legislation have been released five years after the amendment was passed to help the BJP with general elections this year.

However, the CAA, discriminatory on its own, can become lethal if other initiatives are thrown into the mix, namely the National Register of Citizens and Forei­g­ners Tribunals. The NRC, a register of all citizens, is currently implemented in Assam. Anyone deemed not to have proper documentation can be stripped of their nationality by the tribunals and held in refugee camps. Again, their operation, for now is restricted to Assam owing to its borders with Bangladesh and Bhutan. Many observers, including Amnesty International, India, believe that such a combination of measures can be weaponised against Indian Muslims, while other religious groups covered under the CAA will have a fast track to citizenship as they will have been present in India prior to the 2014 cut-off date.

India’s supreme court, which is now expected to hear the petitions in the wake of the promulgation of CAA rules, may try to atone for its past omissions by striking down parts of the amendment. The BJP may introduce a fresh amendment near the end of Modi’s imminent third term as prime minister, removing the long past cut-off date, making its neighbours squirm, putting some more wind in BJP’s sails to float into the 2029 elections.

The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.

shahzadsharjeel1@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2024