Citizenship Amendment Act Protests

1. There are border states in India where many people don’t want illegal immigrants to get citizenship or any other benefits. This Act, by giving citizenship to illegal immigrants, doesn’t respect those people’s needs and so there have been protests from this angle by many people (mostly in those states).

2. This Act also arbitrarily discriminates on the basis of religion and location, and in the guise of helping minorities, it allows non-Muslims in certain countries who entered India before end of 2014 to get fast tracked for citizenship. Muslim minorities in those countries (like Ahmadiyas) as well as linguistic and ethnic minitories in neighboring countries are ignored. There have been protests from this angle by many people.

3. The “chronology”, as repeated by the home minister, is that a National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be prepared across the entire country and those without evidence of citizenship would be thrown in detention centers. Consider that there are hundreds of millions of people in India who don’t have a birth certificate (not issued or issued as one original and lost) and the fact that even an Indian passport is not a true proof of citizenship (there’s precedence with legal doubts cast on this). No government issued document is a proof of citizenship since all of those could be obtained by dubious means by anyone. This is ripe for bureaucratic abuse and corruption. Mix in the fact that the rules of the CAA could be changed by the executive to include certain non-Muslims even when the NRC declares them as not citizens, you have a huge self created problem where hundreds of millions could be declared stateless while many others are running from pillar to post with bribes in hand to be recognized as citizens.