India is home to 200 million Muslims. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they have faced mounting threats to their status in the majority-Hindu country. On 11 Dec 2019, the Government of India passed Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA-2019) with the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) having outright majority. The CAA-2019 paves way to citizenship for 6 specified minorities (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians) seeking refuge from 3 predominantly Muslim countries – Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
At first glance, the act may seem like a laudable effort to protect persecuted minorities. It says, it will grant citizenship to a host of religious minorities who fled three nearby countries where they may have faced persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan before 2015. But Muslims will get no such protection. The CAA is closely linked with another contentious document: India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). That citizenship list is part of the government’s effort to identify and weed out people it claims are illegal immigrants in the northeastern state of Assam. India says many Muslims whose families originally came from neighboring Bangladesh are not rightful citizens, even though they’ve lived in Assam for decades. When the NRC was published in August, around 2 million people, many of them Hindus, some of them Muslims, found that their names were not on it. They were told they had a limited time in which to prove that they are, in fact, citizens. Otherwise, they can be rounded up into massive new detention camps and, ultimately, deported. So far, this measure affects potentially 2 million people in India out of which 1.4 million were Hindus and remaining were Muslims.
This CAA 2019 was implemented to make this 1.4 million Hindus excluded in NRC 2019 to be considered as citizens excluding the Muslims. However, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has said it plans to extend the NRC process across the country. As part of on-going persecution on Muslim community in India, the Mushrik Modi government, the butcher of Gujrat and Kashmir, has undertaken this NRC process to implement BJP’s goal to serve Hindus, and expel Muslims from the country as ‘foreign infiltrators’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshis’. BJP President, Amit Shah, said “…. BJP has vowed to not spare even a single Bangladeshi infiltrator. We will expel all of them”. Also, Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah have several times confirmed that no Hindu will be expelled rather they will be given citizenship. It is feared that the stateless Muslims will also face death and persecution from non-Muslim citizens, and their properties will be plundered as war booty.
CAA 2019 paves the way for consolidation of the US backed BJP in power by way of a gaining Hindu vote bank:
Of all the regions of the world, Eurasia is the most important for the US foreign policy planners, and America is trying to ensure that no competitor emerges in that region. America sees that the actual competitor for them now in this region is China. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, US strategists have viewed China as the greatest threat to US interests. In practice, US strategists have used Asia-Pacific countries to sabotage China’s rise as a naval power. They employed the Indian Subcontinent to counter the rise of China as the dominant power in Eurasia and while America was strengthening its capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region through a large number of alliances with Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia and Australia, no major alliance occurred in the subcontinent, especially with India until the Vajpayee came to head the government in the late 1990s. The exploitation of India culminated after President Clinton’s visit in 2000, and shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration focused on India. A large proportion of US actions were directed at bridging the military gap between India and China, according to US programs. From these measures is America’s nuclear agreement with India.
Indian politics has since partition been dominated by the Congress Party, the party of its founder Allan Octovian Hume, a British nationalist. This one-party domination, with Nehru being the first prime minister collapsed in 1998 for a brief period when the BJP came to office and it seemed, for a while at least, that a new two-party system would replace the monopoly of Congress. When the BJP lost power in 2004 and Congress returned to dominate Indian politics for a decade, such views seemed premature. However, since 2014 under Narendra Modi, the BJP returned and today dominates the Indian political scene, winning a landslide electoral victory in May 2019. The Bharatiya Janata Party has achieved the rare feat of returning to power at the Centre with an even bigger majority. In 2014, BJP had scored on 282 on its own and in 2019 it scored on 302. With an established majority in Rajya Sabha, the Modi government is looking at an easy sail through the next five years of policymaking. This is in no small part down to both the Obama and Trump administrations barely concealing their support for Modi. For the Americans, the BJP government can be enlisted to side with it in its quest to counterbalance against its new global competitor, China. This is why despite his obvious passing of CAA 2019, a discriminatory Law to Deprive Muslims of Indian Citizenship, followed by the power grab of Kashmir, the Modi Government received the support of US as evident by the statement of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters at a news conference at the conclusion of the 2+2 ministerial talks on 19 Dec 2019, “We care deeply and always will protect minorities and religious rights everywhere. We honour Indian democracy as they have a robust debate on the issue that you raised”. He said, “We understand that India has rightful concerns about a terrorism emanating from Pakistan and we assured them that we will take that in to account”. Similar trends can also be seen in Sri Lanka’s political scenario, Sri Lanka’s new government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, backed by US wants to undo the previous regime’s move to lease the southern port of Hambantota to a Chinese venture, citing national interest.
Hence this CAA 2019, is to make sure that the BJP in the next 2024 election, ensure to retain the majority seats and also to gain the majority in the states where they didn’t score in the past two consecutive elections. This NRC and CAA 2019 paves way to expel Muslims from the country as ‘foreign infiltrators’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshis so that they can gain the Hindu vote bank in the region and consolidates its power to fulfil the agenda of his master, United States of America in encountering China.
The Muslims in India should stop looking back the solution in left and centre left political parties (UPA) who are doing a vote bank politics by exploiting this event. And muslins should stop doing the campaign for these parties in order to make the right leaned (NDA) BJP to loss, thinking that will relieve the Muslims from these issues. The UPA and NDA are two sides of same coin called Secularism.
Firstly, as Muslims, we should understand that trying to secure our rights and interests by attempting to play the political games of the flawed secular democratic system will always end in failure. Firstly, under this system, politicians and parties will promise the world to different sectors of their electorate to secure power but more often than not, fail to deliver. Then, they will ride the tide of popular sentiments in order to stay in power, regardless of how detestable those sentiments may be or the detrimental impact on minorities.
However, secondly and most importantly, Allah (swt) prohibits Muslims from engaging in any political system where sovereignty is given to the human being to legislate laws. Therefore, to try and play the corrupt secular political game will not only lead to failure in this world, due to the inherent inability of politicians and parliaments to create laws which are just to all, but crucially it will lead to failure in the Hereafter. Allah (swt) says, ثُمَّ جَعَلْنَاكَ عَلَىٰ شَرِيعَةٍ مِنَ الْأَمْرِ فَاتَّبِعْهَا وَلَا تَتَّبِعْ أَهْوَاءَ الَّذِينَ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ “We made for you a law, so follow it, and not the whims of those who have no knowledge.” [Al-Jathiya: 18]
The only way to lift the state of fear that Muslims in India and Muslim minorities across the world today is to establish a state in the Muslim lands that truly represents the interests of Muslims and Islam, and that will act as their shield and guardian regardless of where they live. This state is the righteous Khilafah (Caliphate) based upon the method of the Prophethood «إِنَّا كُنَّا أَذَلَّ قَوْمٍ فَأَعَزَّنَا اللَّهُ بِالْإِسْلَامِ فَمَهْمَا نَطْلُبُ الْعِزَّةَ بِغَيْرِ مَا أَعَزَّنَا اللَّهُ بِهِ أَذَلَّنَا اللَّهُ» Umar ibn al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, said, “Verily, we were a disgraceful people and Allah honored us with Islam. If we seek honor from anything besides that with which Allah honored us, Allah will disgrace us.” (al-Mustadrak)
Abdul Hameed Mansoor