Students across universities in the country and other notable institutions like TISS and IISc Bangalore have come out to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by the Rajya Sabha last week which seeks to grant citizenship to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis and Buddhists that are persecuted in the countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The protestors feel the Act is unconstitutional because it violates Articles 14 of the Constitution which speaks of equal treatment for all citizens while Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. There are several arguments from several quarters that if India, a country with a majority Hindu population does not grant citizenship to Hindus persecuted in the above Muslim- majority countries, governed by the tenets of Islam then where will they seek refuge. The counter argument is that the Hindu and Muslim population from Bangladesh has been spilling into India – the former for economic reasons and the latter ostensibly for being persecuted. The question is whether India a third world developing country with poor human development indices can actually feed more mouths by granting citizenship to illegal migrants from Bangladesh which has a substantial Hindu population that have been spilling into India’s North East since 1947 and have not stopped till date.
The protests in other parts of India are different from those in Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura – three states that share a long and porous boundary with Bangladesh. In the North East the protestors have decided that their respective states have borne the brunt of migration and they don’t care what religion the migrants belong to but that the CAA should be exempted from these states. In a clever move the Central Government had succeeded to divide the people of the region by exempting CAB from the ILP governed states of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Mizoram and by quickly making a law to grant ILP to Manipur too. In Meghalaya the CAA is applicable in the Scheduled areas which exclude the Shillong Municipality and the Cantonment. Both these areas falling in what is called the European Ward are bursting at the seams and all civic management has failed due to extreme pressure on resources. If these areas are within the ambit of CAB the population will spill over to the Scheduled areas too as is happening today. This is what people fear the most. The indigenous people of Tripura are reduced to just 31 % of the population. Hence people are agitated by the CAA which is considered as the BJP’s master stroke for cultivating vote bank politics.