THERE IS
NO VACCINE! THEY WILL INJECT THE ENGINEERED "VIRUS" ITSELF THAT THEY
NEVER ISOLATED! THIS BORIS PUPPET SHIT DOES NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT HE HAS
BEEN ORDERED TO READ!
MADE BY INFALLIBLE GODS
FOR A VIRUS THAT DID NOT AND DOES NOT MUTATE?
Just keep the kids away from all vaccines!
But, they will impose it EVERYWHERE unless we rise up en masse as we are the
ones paying for that bio weapon to be injected into our body!
We are indeed in big trouble! We had bomb fire
holocausts, now we will have bio weapon holocausts and totalitarian regimes all
in the name of democracy!
Friday 4th of December 2020 (Having my breakfast at 16
hours)
THOUGHTS OF THE COVID-911 DAY
BASHEER AND SATAN - THOUGHTS OF THE COVID-911 DAY - FRIDAY 4 DECEMBER 2020
SATAN: Basheer, are you a genius?
BASHEER: Satan, is it one of your trick questions
again?Of course,I was never one, am not, and never will be
one!
SATAN: Then, what are you doing on My Earth?
BASHEER: I do not know, but for sure I stay here to help a
few loved ones who I am convinced need my help!
SATAN: What if you had none?
BASHEER: Well, I would keep away from humans and join the
animal and the other kind far, far away from humans!
SATAN: Do you hate humans?
BASHEER: They have harmed me so much, yet made me feel so
happy at the same time, but I am not of much use even to my own, and they do
not give a damn whether I live or not or need anything or any help in my old
days! But, as long as they are happy, I am in peace!
SATAN: I am so glad to hear that!
BASHEER: I know, you are the one who created all this
inhumanity!
SATAN: No, you are wrong, it was not me, but your God who
did all this!He challenged me and He
lost.He promised me Hell in the end,
but all three of us know there is no such Hell nor can there ever be any as it
does not make any sense at all, and it cannot do Justice to any kind of crime committed
against God or His Creation!Eternal
Hell is a joke!
BASHEER: When humans were living around vast expanses of sand
with a scorching sun, and enjoyed peaceful nights filled with stars and a
bright moon, some, like Omar Sharif while Joollywood were shooting that Ashké
Nazi garbage called Lawrence of Arabia, concluded there must be a God Creator after
all the nations of the earth had worshipped in vain a multitude of Gods,
Persians, Hindis, Greeks, Romans, and Natives around the world. It was the best idea that they could come up
with and, while communicating with the Invisible Realm, they woke up to the reality
of a Creator God and were convinced they could help humans in leading a
righteous life loving and sharing, in peace and harmony, by enjoining good and
forbidding evil! It was an excellent
idea, but they would soon found out that humans were hopeless because you,
Satan, were always present to mislead them, and they were not strong or sincere
enough, not honest with each other, and with an impure heart. With you around, day and night, they had no
chance at all or almost!
SATAN: Stop, my friend, I was supposed to say those Satanic lines,
not you!There is a bunch of European Caucasoid
Christians who hate Caucasians because the latter are mostly Muslims.You have met many while living in the
Caucasus, and they are among the most beautiful biological types, especially
the women.But, they were conquered by
the Bolshevik Caucasoids from US America, Europe, and elsewhere.When Herr Adolf Hitler tried to preserve the
biological type of his people and establish peace and harmony, the Caucasoids slaughtered
and holocausted his people, conquered his country and gave it to the same Ashké
Nazis who he was fighting as they had taken over and perverted the morals of his
country and nation and were starving them! His Haavarah Agreement with the Ashké Nazis
allowed their Chosen Tribe to leave Germany as they were causing too much mischief.But, they blamed everything on me!This time, I gave them COVID-911 to shut all
of them up for good!They deserve only
Fascist Totalitarianism, Eternal Military Lockdown, and a Biological Reset as
was promised to them by the Bilderbergs!
BASHEER:Satan, how
dare you say such a thing, don't you know it is a crime and against the law of
Hashem to say anything good about the most evil man that God has ever created
after you or anything bad about Bill Gates' and Big Pharma's deadly vaccines?Herr Hitler was born pure Evil (according to
the presstitute media and Academia!) and had to end up his life and that of his
wife Eval Braun after the Caucasoids had fire bombed and holocausted the main
towns in his country!
SATAN:Who is that
Hashem you are talking about?Oh, that
other God Israel had invented or chosen to compete with the Arabian EL believed
to have created the first man and woman on Earth!But, they had no evidence to prove that one,
and their own plagiarised writings prove there were other humans living outside
of Eden at the time of Adam, Lilith and Eve.Do not try to fool me, Basheer, I know you love that man Hitler who you
even wrote many times was the greatest human being you have known from that earlier
part of the XXth Century!
BASHEER:I must not
be the only one!My father must have loved
him too, he called his dog Hitler (Adolf means Noble Wolf)! We first had Black (because he was black), and
then Hitler, but I never managed to ask my father why he named his dog Hitler!Uunona, an African Namibian of South Africa, a
former German Colony, gave his son the name Adolf Hitler Uunona!With such a name, he obtained over 80% votes
proving that his people were not ungrateful, and did not hate Herr Adolf at all
like most Caucasoids do!Today, Germany
and Austria belong to ASHKÉ NAZIS and HASHEM (as well as the entire Caucasoid
Ashké Nazi West!)!But, I have known
many Jews bearing this sweet name ADOLF, including my Kosher butcher of Rue
Richer, Paris IXth, just a hundred yards away from where I worked, and another
hundred yards or so from the Folies Bergères, on the same road.What's in a name, asked Mr "Shake Spear"?
SATAN: Well, enough
for today, my good man!Enjoy your Satanic
military lockdown day!
BAFS:Satan, you
cheeky!Tawwakkul Allah! But, I will obviously tie my camel first, and
then rely on God!God remains the Best
that we undeserving humans ever had!
Friday 4th of December 2020
HERR ADOLF HITLER AS
"SATAN" AND "CHARLATAN"???
Tuesday 1st of December 2020
I BELIEVE IN WHATEVER OR WHOEVER, means I do not have any
scientific proof at all except rational, logical, understanding of how humans
should behave in life depending on how knowledgeable, experienced, and wise I
am.
TRUTH 1
When I was growing up, I became aware that I exist only
because a man gave a menstruating woman some of his semen once or many times
causing the woman to become pregnant of new life if she is healthy and
reproductive unless there are outside factors that would prevent us from
reproducing our kind.Today, the ruling
powers decide who can reproduce or not and who can live or die, that is, be
free and breathe natural air, work without requiring a licence, grow natural
food to feed themselves and the entire family, drink natural water for free,
and educate their children according to their own choice, and move about the
world without any hindrance at all.
TRUTH 2
But, as soon as we step outside of our doors, we soon
realise we must respect certain very primitive rules like we cannot enter the
neighbours' house without their permission,steal what belong to them and others, terrorise or kill anybody, rape
their women and young girls, beat up people who are defenceless, and so
on.
TRUTH3
We realise that the only way we can live in harmony and
peace with our neighbours and others is to set down certain rules with the help
of all those concerned or their representatives, the most knowledgeable and the
wisest, and agree on what will make us cohabit in peace.
TRUTH 4
We soon realise that many of us will break some or many of
those rules that will damage the cohesion of the society, clan, tribe, or
nation we just built, and would refuse to listen to reason unless we exercise
force by punishing them and making them pay for the damages they caused, and
make sure they will not do it again.Putting them in prison is not the right thing to do!
TRUTH 5
We already know there is a right and wrong way to lead our
lives.When we educate our children, we
always have recourse to parables, fables, myths, and other stories that we hope
will make our children behave better.
TRUTH 6
Most humans, at a certain point in history, understood that
we have come from somewhere and probably also going somewhere beyond this
life.The way we stood in awe of our
parents and of any authority we are subdued to, make us start thinking there
might be a Greater Authority that we cannot see, but only perceive in our
imagination.And, thinking and believing
that there was such an Authority better than parental, tribal, and national
authority, some of us came up with the idea of God or Gods of the Natural
Elements, and they were regarded as the Wise ones, Messengers of the Almighty
God or Gods, Prophets, Warners, and bringers of Good News.
TRUTH 7
But, despite of that Invisible, Imaginary, and Wise Almighty
Authority held by One or Many Gods, some or many of us still break the rules
established by humans (under inspiration or otherwise) to make us follow their
Path that was meant to lead us to that God or Gods.No matter how many Messengers, Prophets, Wise
men and Wise women would appear in the course of time, humans, tribes, clans, and
nations will still fight among themselves and with others, and break as many
rules they can by force and deception with one and only purpose: become the most powerful and the wealthiest
- like the USA and APARTHEID ISRAEL.
Every
day there are more charts that undermine the "we have to stay home and
cancel everything" narrative, and I have a couple of those for you
today, but first I want to show you something else.
Someone I follow on Twitter just released a Tweet thread that sums up the inhuman COVID response so beautifully that I had to share it with you:
The East Coast is home to a little under 130,000,000 people. And 130
million is the number of people in the world that our global
overreaction to COVID has pushed to the brink of starvation according to
the World Health Organization.
Do you support lockdowns? You may think you’re being virtuous, but
you're being selfish. Imagine driving from Portland, Maine thru Boston,
NYC, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Miami. Now imagine everybody you saw on your
trip starving. All 130 million of them. Those are faces of lockdowns.
Add to that people right here at home so afraid of COVID they stay home
while having strokes and heart attacks. They stay home or are delayed
from chemo and other life-maintaining treatments. Some sit alone in
despair, drinking alcohol or abusing drugs.
Some lash out at spouses and children who have no school or social life in which to find refuge or help -- or detection.
Kids growing up spending formative chunks of their lives learning
that being close to another human is dangerous and the very breathe we
exhale is poison. You don’t think that’s going to have long-term
effects?
Alzheimer's patients confused, lost in their own fading world with no
one working to keep them afloat -- they drown in their isolation.
Grandparents denied the joy of one of the definitive pleasures of life
-- hugging a grandchild or seeing the joy of their faces Christmas
morning.
“But lockdowns save lives,” you cry. But denying human contact, scaring
people to death, driving people to despair -- is this “saving” lives?
And how many lives does it save?
All through the US and Europe many places that locked down thought
they stopped cases, but it wasn’t lockdowns. It was summer. And when
summer was over, COVID returned. Masks, social distancing, lockdowns,
all ripped through by COVID like a football team running through a paper
banner.
No proms, no third-grade shows in a crowded gym, no science fairs, no
big games, no school (that they used to say they didn’t like but now
walk around like zombies pining for the interactions). Shortcomings in
education lead to a lifetime of shortcomings, from career choices
and earning power, to emotional development and family building.
Supply chains disrupted. Jobs lost. Production slowed. 130 million
people in danger of starvation. It’s easy for many of us in the middle
class to hunker down and work from home. Just buy a new computer for
kids' remote schooling and work from the den. Not everybody has that
option.
I was originally going to close this issue here, but I can't resist sharing two charts, courtesy of Ian Miller (@ianmSC).
Remember when Dr. Fauci said Florida was "asking for trouble" by fully
reopening (the state had already been mostly open anyway for a while)?
Sure you do.
And remember when he said New York was a model of how to handle the situation? Again, sure.
Now do you recall him saying anything recently about this?
Me either.
How about California, where nobody can do anything?
They must be doing much better than Florida right now, right?
Hmm:
Let me remind you: there are no restrictions in Florida.
It's almost like all the joy California is taking from its people, and
all the ways it's crushing and impoverishing them, is for nothing.
Now, a reminder:
I moved the Tom Woods Show Elite group off Facebook, for obvious
reasons. It's on MeWe now. Their platform is easy to learn, and very
similar to Facebook.
The group consists of good, smart, friendly
folks (including the old man here) who will keep you sane when everyone
you know thinks Dr. Fauci is a hero and everyone should keep staying
home.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi presents himself as an ascetic economic visionary. He is also a hero of anti-Muslim bigots.Illustration by Tyler Comrie. Photographs by Chris Stein / Getty (wire) and Mohd Zakir / Hindustan Times / Getty (man)
On
August 11th, two weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent soldiers
in to pacify the Indian state of Kashmir, a reporter appeared on the
news channel Republic TV, riding a motor scooter through the city of
Srinagar. She was there to assure viewers that, whatever else they might
be hearing, the situation was remarkably calm. “You can see banks here
and commercial complexes,” the reporter, Sweta Srivastava, said, as she
wound her way past local landmarks. “The situation makes you feel good,
because the situation is returning to normal, and the locals are ready
to live their lives normally again.” She conducted no interviews; there
was no one on the streets to talk to.
Other
coverage on Republic TV showed people dancing ecstatically, along with
the words “Jubilant Indians celebrate Modi’s Kashmir masterstroke.” A
week earlier, Modi’s government had announced that it was suspending
Article 370 of the constitution, which grants autonomy to Kashmir,
India’s only Muslim-majority state. The provision, written to help
preserve the state’s religious and ethnic identity, largely prohibits
members of India’s Hindu majority from settling there. Modi, who rose to
power trailed by allegations of encouraging anti-Muslim bigotry, said
that the decision would help Kashmiris, by spurring development and
discouraging a long-standing guerrilla insurgency. To insure a smooth
reception, Modi had flooded Kashmir with troops and detained hundreds of
prominent Muslims—a move that Republic TV described by saying that “the
leaders who would have created trouble” had been placed in “government
guesthouses.”
The
change in Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics,
but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval. Ever since
Modi was first elected Prime Minister, in 2014, he has been recasting
the story of India, from that of a secular democracy accommodating a
uniquely diverse population to that of a Hindu nation that dominates its
minorities, especially the country’s two hundred million Muslims. Modi
and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and smothered the press into
endorsing what they call the “New India.”
Kashmiris greeted Modi’s
decision with protests, claiming that his real goal was to inundate the
state with Hindu settlers. After the initial tumult subsided, though,
the Times of India and other major newspapers began claiming
that a majority of Kashmiris quietly supported Modi—they were just too
frightened of militants to say so aloud. Television reporters, newly
arrived from Delhi, set up cameras on the picturesque shoreline of Dal
Lake and dutifully repeated the government’s line.
As the reports
cycled through the news, the journalist Rana Ayyub told me over the
phone that she was heading to Kashmir. Ayyub, thirty-six years old, is
one of India’s best-known investigative reporters, famous for
relentlessly pursuing Modi and his aides. As a Muslim from Mumbai, she
has lived on the country’s sectarian divide her whole life. She
suspected that the government’s story about Kashmir was self-serving
propaganda. “I think the repression is probably worse than it’s ever
been,” she said. She didn’t know what she might find, but, she told me,
“I want to speak to those unheard voices.”
In
both Hindi and English, Ayyub speaks with disorienting speed and
infectious warmth; it is difficult to resist answering her questions,
but she might have another one before you finish responding to the
first. On the phone, she invited me to meet her in Mumbai and try to get
into Kashmir, even though foreign correspondents were banned there
during the crackdown. When I arrived, she handed me a pair of scarves
and told me to buy a kurta, the typical Indian tunic. “I am ninety-nine
per cent sure you will be caught, but you should come anyway,” she said,
laughing. “Just don’t open your mouth.”
Ayyub and I landed at the
Srinagar airport two weeks after Modi’s decree. In the terminal was a
desk labelled “Registration for Foreigners,” which she hustled me past,
making sure I kept my head down. The crowd was filled with police and
soldiers, but we made it to the curb without being spotted, climbed into
a taxi, and sped off into Srinagar.
Even from a moving car, it
was clear that the reality in Kashmir veered starkly from the picture in
the mainstream Indian press. Soldiers stood on every street corner.
Machine-gun nests guarded intersections, and shops were shuttered on
each block. Apart from the military presence, the streets were lifeless.
At Khanqah-e-Moula, the city’s magnificent eighteenth-century mosque,
Friday prayers were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet
service was cut off.
Indian intelligence agents are widely
understood to monitor the rosters of local hotels, so Ayyub and I, along
with an Indian photographer named Avani Rai, had arranged to stay with a
friend. When we got there, a Kashmiri doctor who was visiting the house
told us to check the main hospital, where young men were being treated
after security forces fired on them. The police and soldiers were using
small-gauge shotguns—called pellet guns by the locals—and some of the
victims had been blinded. “Go to the ophthalmology ward,” the doctor
said.
At the hospital, we found a scene of barely restrained
chaos, with security officers standing guard and families mixing with
the sick in corridors. While I stood in a corner, trying to make myself
inconspicuous, Ayyub ran to the fourth floor to speak to an eye doctor.
After a few minutes, she returned and motioned for me and Rai to follow.
“Ward eight,” she said. Thirty gunshot victims were inside.
“ ‘Too many tote bags,’ they said.”
Cartoon by Will McPhail
As
the three of us approached, a smartly dressed man with a close-cropped
beard stepped into our path and placed his hand on Ayyub’s shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” he said. Rai looked at me and quietly said,
“Run.” I turned and dashed into the crowd. The bearded man took Ayyub
and Rai by the arm and led them away.
Ayyub grew up in Sahar, a middle-class neighborhood of Mumbai. Her father, Waquif, wrote for a left-wing newspaper called Blitz;
later, he was a high-school principal and a scholar of Urdu, the
language of north India’s Muslims. Rana remembers midnight poetry
readings, when her father’s friends crowded into the living room to
recite their verses. The Ayyubs were the only Muslim family on the
block, but they weren’t isolated. They went into the streets with their
neighbors to celebrate Hindu festivals like Holi and Diwali, and twice a
year they opened their home for Muslim feasts. “The sectarian issue was
always there, but we were insulated from all that,” Ayyub said. “All of
my friends growing up were Hindu.”
Muslim-Hindu harmony was
central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is
home to all the world’s major religions; Muslims constitute about
fourteen per cent of the population. As the British Empire prepared to
withdraw, in 1947, Muslims were so fearful of Hindu domination that they
clamored for a separate state, which became Pakistan. The division of
the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in
history, with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new
borders. In the accompanying violence, as many as two million people
died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians harbored enduring
grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral land. Kashmir, on
the border, became the site of a long-running proxy war.
India’s
remaining Muslims protected themselves by forging an alliance with the
Congress Party—Gandhi and Nehru’s group, which monopolized national
politics for fifty years. But the founders’ vision of the secular state
was not universally shared. In 1925, K. B. Hedgewar, a physician from
central India, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization
dedicated to the idea that India was a Hindu nation, and that Hinduism’s
followers were entitled to reign over minorities. Members of the R.S.S.
believed that many Muslims were descended from Hindus who had been
converted by force, and so their faith was of questionable authenticity.
(The same thinking applied to Christians, who make up about two per
cent of India’s population. Other major religions, including Buddhism
and Sikhism, were considered more authentically Indian.)
Hedgewar
was convinced that Hindu men had been emasculated by colonial
domination, and he prescribed paramilitary training as an antidote. An
admirer of European fascists, he borrowed their predilection for khaki
uniforms, and, more important, their conviction that a group of highly
disciplined men could transform a nation. He thought that Gandhi and
Nehru, who had made efforts to protect the Muslim minority, were
dangerous appeasers; the R.S.S. largely sat out the freedom struggle.
In
January, 1948, soon after independence, Gandhi was assassinated by
Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a former R.S.S. member and an avowed Hindu
nationalist. The R.S.S. was temporarily banned and shunted to the
fringes of public life, but the group gradually reëstablished itself. In
1975, amid civic disorder and economic stagnation, Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi suspended parliament and imposed emergency rule. The
R.S.S. vigorously opposed her and her Congress Party allies. Many of its
members were arrested, which helped legitimize the group as it
reëntered the political mainstream.
The R.S.S.’s original base was
higher-caste men, but, in order to grow, it had to widen its
membership. Among the lower-caste recruits was an eight-year-old named
Narendra Modi, from Vadnagar, a town in the state of Gujarat. Modi
belonged to the low-ranking Ghanchi caste, whose members traditionally
sell vegetable oil; Modi’s father ran a small tea shop near the train
station, where his young son helped. When Modi was thirteen, his parents
arranged for him to marry a local girl, but they cohabited only
briefly, and he did not publicly acknowledge the relationship for many
years. Modi soon left the marriage entirely and dedicated himself to the
R.S.S. As a pracharak—the group’s term for its young, chaste
foot soldiers—Modi started by cleaning the living quarters of senior
members, but he rose quickly. In 1987, he moved to the R.S.S.’s
political branch, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
When Modi
joined, the Party had only two seats in parliament. It needed an issue
to attract sympathizers, and it found one in an obscure religious
dispute. In the northern city of Ayodhya was a mosque, called Babri
Masjid, built by the Mughal emperor Babur in 1528. After independence,
locals placed Hindu idols inside the mosque and became convinced that it
had been built on the former site of a Hindu temple. A legend grew that
the god Ram—an avatar of Vishnu, often depicted with blue skin—had been
born there.
In September, 1990, a senior B.J.P. member named
L. K. Advani began calling for Babri Masjid to be destroyed and for a
Hindu temple to take its place. To build support for the idea, he
undertook a two-month pilgrimage, called the Ram Rath Yatra, across the
Indian heartland. Travelling aboard a Nissan jeep refitted to look like a
chariot, he sometimes gave several speeches a day, inflaming crowds
about what he saw as the government’s favoritism toward Muslims;
sectarian riots followed in his wake, leaving hundreds dead. Advani was
arrested before he reached Ayodhya, but other B.J.P. members carried on,
gathering supporters and donations along the way. On December 6, 1992, a
crowd led by R.S.S. partisans swarmed Babri Masjid and, using axes and
hammers, began tearing the building down. By nightfall, it had been
completely razed.
The
destruction of the mosque incited Hindu-Muslim riots across the
country, with the biggest and bloodiest of them in Mumbai. At first,
Ayyub’s family felt safe; they were surrounded by friends. But, after
several days of mayhem, a Sikh friend, whom the family called Uncle
Bagga, came to tell Waquif that a group of neighborhood men were coming
for his daughters. Waquif was frightened; Rana, who was then nine years
old, had been stricken by polio and, though she was largely recovered,
the illness had weakened the left side of her body. That night, she and
her older sister Iffat fled with Bagga. They stayed with some relatives
of his for three months, before the family reunited in Deonar, a Muslim
ghetto a few miles away. “I felt helpless,” Rana told me. “We were like
toys, moved from one place to another by someone else.”
Deonar is
an impoverished neighborhood of fetid sewers and tin shacks. The Ayyubs,
accustomed to a middle-class existence, found their lives transformed.
“We were living in a very small place, very dirty, on a very crowded and
dirty street,” Rana said. Mumbai had been transformed, too. When she
enrolled in a predominantly Hindu school nearby, her classmates called
her landya, an anti-Muslim slur. “That is the first time I ever
really thought about my identity,” she said. “Our entire
neighborhood—our friends—were going to kill us.”
For the R.S.S.,
the initiative in Ayodhya paid off spectacularly. Membership soared, and
by 1996 the B.J.P. had become the largest party in parliament. During
the dispute over Babri Masjid, Ashis Nandy, a prominent Indian
intellectual, began a series of interviews with R.S.S. members. A
trained psychologist, he wanted to study the mentality of the rising
Hindu nationalists. One of those he met was Narendra Modi, who was then a
little-known B.J.P. functionary. Nandy interviewed Modi for several
hours, and came away shaken. His subject, Nandy told me, exhibited all
the traits of an authoritarian personality: puritanical rigidity, a
constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions, and an enormous
ego that protected a gnawing insecurity. During the interview, Modi
elaborated a fantastical theory of how India was the target of a global
conspiracy, in which every Muslim in the country was likely complicit.
“Modi was a fascist in every sense,” Nandy said. “I don’t mean this as a
term of abuse. It’s a diagnostic category.”
On
February 27, 2002, a passenger train stopped in Godhra, a city in
Gujarat. It was coming from Ayodhya, where many of the passengers had
gone to visit the site where Babri Masjid was destroyed, ten years
earlier, and to advocate for building a temple there. Most of them
belonged to the religious wing of the R.S.S., called the V.H.P.
While
the train sat at the station, Hindu travellers and Muslims on the
platform began to heckle one another. As the train pulled away, it
stalled, and the taunting escalated. At some point, someone—possibly a
Muslim vender with a stove—threw something on fire into one of the cars.
The flame spread, and the passengers were trapped inside; when the door
was finally pushed open, the rush of oxygen sparked a fireball. Some
fifty-eight people suffocated or burned to death. As word of the
disaster spread, the state government allowed members of the V.H.P. to
parade the burned corpses through Ahmedabad, the state’s largest city.
Hindus, enraged by the display, began rampaging and attacking Muslims
across the state.
Mobs
of Hindus prowled the streets, yelling, “Take revenge and slaughter the
Muslims!” According to eyewitnesses, rioters cut open the bellies of
pregnant women and killed their babies; others gang-raped women and
girls. In at least one instance, a Muslim boy was forced to drink
kerosene and swallow a lighted match. Ehsan Jafri, an elderly Congress
Party politician, was paraded naked and then dismembered and burned.
The
most sinister aspect of the riots was that they appeared to have been
largely planned and directed by the R.S.S. Teams of men, armed with
clubs, guns, and swords, fanned out across the state’s Muslim enclaves,
often carrying voter rolls and other official documents that led them to
Muslim homes and shops.
The Chief Minister of the Gujarati
government was Narendra Modi, who had been appointed to the position
five months before. As the riots accelerated, Modi became invisible; he
summoned the Indian Army but held the soldiers in their barracks as the
violence spun out of control. In many areas of Gujarat, the police not
only stood by but, according to numerous human-rights groups, even took
part.
When the riots began, Rahul Sharma was the senior police
officer in charge of Bhavnagar, a district with a Muslim population of
more than seventy thousand. In sworn testimony, Sharma later said that
he received no direction from his superiors about how to control the
riots. On the fourth day, a crowd of thousands gathered around the
Akwada Madrassa, a Muslim school, which had about four hundred children
inside. The vigilantes were brandishing swords and torches. “They were
acting in an organized way,” Sharma said. “They were going to kill the
children.” Sharma ordered his men to use lethal force to prevent an
attack; when warning shots had no effect, they fired, killing two men
and injuring several more. The crowd scattered, and Sharma escorted the
children to safety.
In nearly every other district, though, the
violence carried on unchecked. Sharma, instead of being celebrated as a
hero, was transferred out of the district to a make-work desk job. L. K.
Advani—the advocate of destroying the mosque in Ayodhya, who had risen
to be India’s Home Minister—called Sharma and suggested that he had let
too many Hindus die.
The journalist Rana Ayyub is renowned for pursuing Modi and his aides.Photograph by Supranav Dash for The New Yorker
The
riots dragged on for nearly three months; when they were over, as many
as two thousand people were dead and nearly a hundred and fifty thousand
had been driven from their homes. The ethnic geography of Gujarat was
transformed, with most of its Muslims crowded into slums. One slum
formed inside the Ahmedabad dump, a vast landscape of trash and sewage
that towered hundreds of feet in the air. (That ghetto, dubbed Citizens’
Village by its inhabitants, is still home to a thousand people, who
live in shacks and breathe the noxious air; when the monsoons come,
filth from the dump floods the streets and shanties.)
As
the riots festered, Ayyub, who was then nineteen, decided to help.
After telling her mother that she was going trekking with a friend in
the Himalayas, she put herself on a train to the Gujarati city of
Vadodara. Because the unrest was still flaring, she disguised herself
with a bright-red bindi—the dot of paint that Hindu women wear on their
forehead.
She spent three weeks in relief camps, helping rape
victims file police reports. The camps were surrounded by open-pit
latrines, and the smell of sewage was overpowering; children lay around
with flies on them. At times, mobs armed with swords and Molotov
cocktails came looking for Muslims. During one incursion, Ayyub hid in a
house and peered out as a crowd of some sixty men jostled outside. “I
was palpitating,” she said. “Gujarat made me realize that what happened
in Mumbai was not an aberration.”
After
the riots, Modi’s government did almost nothing to provide for the tens
of thousands of Muslims forced from their homes; aid was supplied
almost entirely by volunteers. Asked about this, Modi said, “Relief
camps are actually child-making factories. Those who keep on multiplying
the population should be taught a lesson.” Although some Hindu rioters
were arrested, just a few dozen were ultimately convicted. Mayaben
Kodnani, a B.J.P. minister, was the only official to be punished
significantly; she was convicted of murder, attempted murder, and
conspiracy. When Modi’s government later came to power in Delhi, she was
cleared of all charges.
In the following months, there were
indications of substantial government complicity. According to
independent investigations, the Hindu mobs had moved decisively,
following leaders who appeared to have received explicit instructions.
“These instructions were blatantly disseminated by the government, and
in most cases, barring a few sterling exceptions, methodically carried
out by the police and Indian Administrative Service,” concluded a
citizen-led inquiry that included former Supreme Court justices and a
former senior police official.
During the violence, a senior
federal official named Harsh Mander travelled to Gujarat and was stunned
by the official negligence. Seeing that many of his colleagues were
colluding in the bloodbath, he retired early from his job to work in the
makeshift camps where Muslim refugees were gathering. He has dedicated
much of the rest of his life to reminding the public what happened and
who was responsible. “No sectarian riot ever happens in India unless the
government wants it to,” Mander told me. “This was a state-sponsored
massacre.”
A few officials claimed that the decision to encourage
the riots came from Modi himself. Haren Pandya, a Modi rival and Cabinet
minister, gave sworn testimony about the riots, and also spoke to the
newsweekly Outlook. He said that, on the night the unrest
began, he had attended a meeting at Modi’s bungalow, at which Modi
ordered senior police officials to allow “people to vent their
frustration and not come in the way of the Hindu backlash.” A police
official named Sanjiv Bhatt recalled that, at another meeting that
night, Modi had expressed his hope that “the Muslims be taught a lesson
to ensure that such incidents do not recur.”
But there was not
much political will to pursue the evidence against Modi, and his
accusers did not stay in the public eye for long. After Bhatt made his
accusation, he was charged in the death of a suspect in police custody—a
case that had sat dormant for more than two decades—and sentenced to
life in prison. In 2003, the Cabinet minister Haren Pandya was found
dead in his car in Ahmedabad. His wife left little doubt about who she
believed was behind it. “My husband’s assassination was a political
murder,” she said.
For
Modi, the riots had a remarkable effect. The U.S. and the United
Kingdom banned him for nearly a decade, and he was shunned by senior
leaders of his party. (In 2004, the B.J.P. Prime Minister, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, was voted out. He blamed Modi for the loss.)
In
Gujarat, though, his prestige grew. Rather than seeking reconciliation,
Modi led a defiant Hindu-pride march across the state, which was met
with an outpouring of support. Modi often spoke in barely coded language
that signalled to his followers that he shared their bigotry. In one
speech, during the march, he suggested that the state’s Muslims were a
hindrance to be overcome. “If we raise the self-respect and morale of
fifty million Gujaratis,” he said, “the schemes of Alis, Malis, and
Jamalis will not be able to do us any harm.” The crowd let out a cheer.
That December, after a campaign in which he made several incendiary
anti-Muslim speeches, he led the B.J.P. to a huge electoral victory in
Gujarat.
Elsewhere
in India, the B.J.P.’s fortunes were sinking; as a result, Modi’s
hard-line faction was able to seize the Party leadership. He also began
to build a national reputation as a pro-business leader who presided
over rapid economic development. “The B.J.P. was a dead party,” Ayyub
told me. “The only chance they had to power was Modi, because he had all
these followers—all these big businessmen—and so the riots were all
forgotten.”
Eventually, a Supreme Court investigative team
declared that there was not enough evidence to charge Modi in the
riots—a finding that human-rights groups dismissed as politically
motivated. A few persistent advocates tried to keep the issue alive. In
2007, when Modi appeared on the Indian network CNN-IBN, the journalist
Karan Thapar asked him, “Why can’t you say that you regret the
killings?”
“What I have to say I have said at that time,” Modi
replied, his face hardening. As Thapar kept pressing, Modi grew
agitated. “I have to rest,” he said. “I need some water.” Then he
removed his microphone and walked away.
In 2013, when another
reporter asked if he felt sorry about the deaths of so many Muslims, he
suggested that he had been a helpless bystander. “If someone else is
driving a car and we’re sitting behind—even then, if a puppy comes under
the wheel, will it be painful?” Modi said. “Of course it is.”
To
many observers, Modi’s success stemmed from his willingness to play on
profound resentments, which for decades had been considered offensive to
voice in polite society. Even though India’s Muslims were typically
poorer than their fellow-citizens, many Hindus felt that they had been
unjustly favored by the central government. In private, Hindus sniped
that the Muslims had too many children and that they supported
terrorism. The Gandhi-Nehru experiment had made Muslims feel unusually
secure in India, and partly as a result there has been very little
radicalization, outside Kashmir; still, many Hindus considered them a
constant threat. “Modi became a hero for all the Hindus of India,”
Nirjhari Sinha, a scientist in Gujarat who investigated the riots, told
me. “That is what people tell me, at parties, at dinners. People
genuinely feel that Muslims are terrorists—and it is because of Modi
that Muslims are finally under control.”
In
1993, Ayyub’s father wrote a book about the riots in Mumbai. He titled
it “I Am Alive”—his habitual response to friends who wrote to him during
the unrest to see how he was. When Rana Ayyub began considering a
career in journalism, she showed some of the same pugnacious
self-assertion. “In my childhood, everybody said, ‘She’s a weak
child,’ ” she told me. “It’s like you have to prove a point to everybody
that, no, I’m not a weak child.”
At first, she wanted to effect
change by joining the civil service. But, she said, “people told me,
‘There’s no way you will be able to do anything as a police officer,
because you still have to be answerable to cops and corrupt
politicians.’ ” After graduating from Sophia College in Mumbai with a
degree in English literature, Ayyub bounced around from Web sites to a
television station before landing at a magazine called Tehelka. Published in English, Tehelka
had a small circulation but an outsized reputation for tough
investigations. Ayyub took to the work, producing pieces on killings by
the police and a smuggling racket run by officials in Mumbai. “I was
trying to help people,” she told me. “I was trying to figure out what
was happening, and it made me feel better about myself.”
In 2010, in a series of cover stories for Tehelka,
Ayyub tied Modi’s closest adviser, Amit Shah, to a sensational crime.
The scion of a high-caste family, Shah had trained as a biochemist but
excelled as a political tactician. A onetime president of the Gujarat
Chess Association, he had twice helped engineer Modi’s election as the
top official in Gujarat; afterward, he was made the Minister of State
for Home Affairs.
Ayyub was investigating a case that had begun
five years before, when police in Gujarat announced that they had
fatally shot a suspected terrorist dispatched by Pakistan to assassinate
Modi. In political and journalistic circles, the announcement inspired
skepticism; rumors had been circulating that the police killed criminals
and then pretended that they were Muslim assassins, heroically thwarted
just before they could get to Modi. Wised-up Indians derided the police
claims as “fake encounters,” but, among Gujaratis who were alarmed by
the riots, they helped boost Modi’s reputation as a defender of Hindus.
“But I’m conducting an experiment: will the twentieth cookie taste as good as the first?”
Cartoon by William Haefeli
It
turned out that the alleged assassin, a local extortionist named
Sohrabuddin Sheikh, had no history of Islamist militancy. Before long,
federal investigators established that he had been murdered by the
police. There were witnesses, including Sheikh’s wife and a criminal
associate of his. But, a couple of days after the killing, his wife was
murdered and her body burned; the associate was killed in police custody
a year later.
Ayyub didn’t believe that the ultimate
responsibility lay with the police. “I never looked at the arrests that
were made, the people who shoot,” she told me. “I looked for the
kingpins.” One source, a police officer, suggested that Amit Shah had
been involved. Ayyub first met the officer at a secluded house in the
countryside. “He could see that my hands were shaking,” she told me. “He
said, ‘If you’re going to do this story, then you have to stop
shaking.’ ” The next time they met—in a graveyard, at 3 A.M.,
with Ayyub disguised in a burqa—he gave her a CD, hidden in a bouquet
of flowers. It contained six years of Shah’s telephone records,
including the times and locations of his calls.
Using the records,
Ayyub showed that Shah and the three officers suspected of murdering
Sheikh’s associate had been in extensive contact, before and after the
killing. Her reporting also offered an explanation of Shah’s motive: a
police official told her that the murdered criminals “knew something
that could have been damning for the minister.”
Ayyub was not the
first journalist to expose official misconduct in the case, but the
evidence around Shah was explosive. Federal agents asked her for a copy
of Shah’s phone records, and she obliged. Within weeks, Shah was
arrested on charges of murder and extortion; he had allegedly been
involved in the same illicit business as Sheikh. (A spokesman for Shah
denied his complicity, saying, “Shah was implicated in the said criminal
offence purely on political considerations.”) Federal police eventually
charged thirty-eight other people, including Gujarat’s top police
official, the former Home Minister for the state of Rajasthan, and more
than twenty officers suspected of being involved in the murders.
The
morning of Shah’s arrest, Ayyub awoke to find that her reporting was
the top of the news. A popular television anchor read the entirety of
one of her pieces on the air. “I was just a twenty-six-year-old Muslim
girl,” she said. “I felt people would finally see what I can do.” Her
stories, along with others, set off a series of official investigations
into the Gujarati police, who were suspected of killing more than twenty
people in “fake encounters.” But, she thought, even Shah was not the
ultimate kingpin. Her source had told her that the police were under
intense pressure to stall the investigation and to hide records from
federal investigators—suggesting that someone powerful was trying to
squelch the case. The headline of one of her stories was “So Why Is Narendra Modi Protecting Amit Shah?”
Despite
the evidence piling up around Modi, he only grew stronger.
Increasingly, he was mentioned as a candidate for national office. In
2007, while running for reëlection as Chief Minister, Modi taunted
members of the Congress Party to come after him. “Congress people say
that Modi is indulging in ‘encounters’—saying that Modi killed
Sohrabuddin,” he told a crowd of supporters. “You tell me—what should I
do with Sohrabuddin?” he asked.
“Kill him!” the crowd roared. “Kill him!”
Within
a few weeks of Shah’s arrest, Ayyub hit on an idea for a new article:
“If I can go after Shah, why not Modi?” She told her editors at Tehelka
that she suspected Modi of far graver crimes than previously reported.
If she went undercover, she argued, she could insinuate herself into his
inner circle and learn the truth.
In the United States, it is a
cardinal rule of journalism that reporters shouldn’t lie about their
identity; undercover operations tend to be confined to the industry’s
yellower margins. In India, the practice is more common, if still
controversial. In 2000, Tehelka sent a former cricket player,
wearing a hidden camera, to expose widespread match-fixing and bribery
in the sport. Later that year, two reporters posing as representatives
of a fake company offered to sell infrared cameras to the Ministry of
Defense. Thirty-six officials agreed to take bribes; the Minister of
Defense resigned.
Tarun Tejpal, Tehelka’s editor, told me
that he authorized stings only when there appeared to be no other way
to get the story. In this case, he said, “Modi and Shah were
untouchable. The truth would never come out.” He told Ayyub to go
forward.
As she began reporting, Ayyub created an elaborate
disguise, designed to appeal to the vanities of Gujarat’s political
establishment. “Indians have a weakness for being recognized in
America,” she said. “The idea that they would be famous in the United
States—it was irresistible to them.” She became Maithili Tyagi, an
Indian-American student at the American Film Institute Conservatory in
Los Angeles, visiting India to make a documentary. She invented a story
about her family, saying that her father was a professor of Sanskrit and
a devotee of Hindu-nationalist ideas. Ayyub, who has distinctive curly
hair, straightened it and tucked it into a bun. She rehearsed an
American accent, and, for added verisimilitude, hired a French
assistant, whom she called Mike. Only her parents knew what she was
doing; she stayed in touch on a separate phone.
In the fall of
2010, Ayyub rented a tiny room in Ahmedabad. For eight months, she
flattered her way into the local élite, claiming that her film would
focus on Gujaratis who were prospering under Modi’s tenure. “Modi’s
biggest support comes from Gujarati-Americans,” she told me. “I said, I
want to meet the most influential people who can tell me the Gujarat
story—who will tell me the secret sauce of what Mr. Modi has done in the
past fifteen years.”
At first, Ayyub and Mike appeared only at
apolitical social events, to get locals used to seeing them around. As
she moved in closer, she began wearing hidden cameras and microphones—in
her watch, in her kurta, in her phone. (When she bought the minicams,
at a Spy Shop in New Delhi, she told the salesman that she was trying to
catch an adulterous husband.) Ayyub was welcomed nearly everywhere. She
made revealing recordings of senior Gujarati officials, some of whom
directly accused Modi and Shah of wrongdoing. Even Modi agreed to see
her for a brief chat in his office, where his staff offered her
biographies of him to read. Modi showed her copies of Barack Obama’s
books. “He said, ‘Maithili, look at this. I want to be like him
someday,’ ” she recalled. She was struck by his canniness. “I thought
Modi was either going to be Prime Minister or he was going to jail.”
Ayyub
took her findings back to her editors. But, after reviewing
transcripts, Tejpal decided against publishing a story. The
conversations were mostly of officials implicating others—often Modi and
Shah. Tejpal told me that he needed people admitting their own crimes.
“The fundamental ethics of the sting is that a sting is no good if a
person doesn’t indict oneself,” he said. “If you come to me and say, ‘I
had a conversation with someone, and he told me that Tom, Dick, and
Harry are fuckers, and he knows that Tom is taking money from So-and-So,
and Harry really fucked So-and-So,’ it means nothing. That’s just cheap
gossip.”
Ayyub
was convinced that Tejpal had succumbed to pressure from the B.J.P. “He
caved in,” she told me. “I was inside Modi’s and Shah’s inner circle,
as close as you could get.” (Tejpal denied this, and other editors spoke
in support of him.)
Determined to get her story out, Ayyub wrote a
draft of a book and shopped it to English-language newspapers,
magazines, and publishing houses. All rejected her pitch. Some said that
the book was too partisan; most argued that her methods could expose
them to lawsuits. Several editors told me privately that they thought
Ayyub’s work was revelatory—but that it was impossible to publish. “We
wanted to excerpt the book on the cover of our magazine, but word got
around, and phone calls started coming in,” Krishna Prasad, who was then
the editor of Outlook, told me. “We simply couldn’t do it.”
By
2012, Modi had become the most recognizable B.J.P. leader in India, and
seemed likely to run for Prime Minister. “Everyone saw the writing on
the wall,” Ayyub said. “Modi was going to win, and no one wanted to
alienate him.” Ayyub kept trying to find a publisher, but nothing came
through. She told me that she fell into a profound funk, relying on
antidepressants for the next four years. In 2013, Tejpal, her editor at Tehelka,
was accused of sexual assault and spent seven months in prison before
being released on bail. (He maintains his innocence, and the case is
ongoing.) The magazine all but collapsed. “I thought that was the end,”
she said.
As
Modi began his run for Prime Minister, in the fall of 2013, he sold
himself not as a crusading nationalist but as a master manager, the
visionary who had presided over an economic boom in Gujarat. His
campaign’s slogan was “The good days are coming.” A close look at the
data showed that Gujarat’s economy had grown no faster under his
administration than under previous ones—the accelerated growth was “a
fantastically crafted fiction,” according to Prasad, the former editor.
Even so, many of India’s largest businesses flooded his campaign with
contributions.
Modi was helped by an overwhelming public
perception that the Congress Party, which had been in power for most of
the past half century, had grown arrogant and corrupt. Its complacency
was personified by the Gandhi family, whose members dominated the Party
but appeared diffident and out of touch. Rahul Gandhi, the head of the
Party (and Nehru’s great-grandson), was dubbed the “reluctant prince” by
the Indian media.
“People
genuinely feel that Muslims are terrorists—and it is because of Modi
that Muslims are finally under control,” Nirjhari Sinha, a scientist in
Gujarat, said.Photograph by Arko Datto for The New Yorker
By
contrast, Modi and his team were disciplined, focussed, and responsive.
“The Gandhis would keep chief ministers, who had travelled across the
country to see them, waiting for days—they didn’t care,” an Indian
political commentator who has met the Gandhis as well as Modi told me.
“With Modi’s people, you got right in.” While the Congress leaders often
behaved as if they were entitled to rule, the B.J.P.’s leaders
presented themselves as ascetic, committed, and incorruptible. Modi, who
is said to do several hours of yoga every day, typically wore simple
kurtas, and members of his immediate family worked in modest jobs and
were conspicuously absent from senior government positions; whatever
other allegations floated around him, he could not be accused of
material greed.
The
B.J.P. won a plurality of the popular vote, placing Modi at the head of
a governing coalition. As Prime Minister, he surprised many Indians by
challenging people to confront problems that had gone unaddressed. One
was public defecation, a major cause of disease throughout India. At an
early speech in Delhi, he announced a nationwide program to build public
toilets in every school—a prosaic improvement that gratified many
Indians, even those who could afford indoor plumbing. Modi also
addressed a series of widely publicized gang rapes by speaking in
bracingly modern terms. “Parents ask their daughters hundreds of
questions,” he said. “But have any dared to ask their sons where they
are going?”
The address set the tone for Modi’s premiership, or at least for part of it. As a young pracharak,
he had taken a vow of celibacy, and he gave no public sign of breaking
it. Unburdened by family commitments, he worked constantly. People who
saw him said he exuded a vitality that seemed to compensate for his
otherwise solitary existence. “When you have that kind of power, that
kind of adoration, you don’t need romance,” the Indian political
commentator told me. In Gujarat, Modi had focussed on big-ticket
projects, wooing car manufacturers and bringing electricity to villages;
as Prime Minister, he introduced a sweeping reform of bankruptcy laws
and embarked on a multibillion-dollar campaign of road construction.
Modi’s effort to transform his image succeeded in the West, as well. In the United States, newspaper columnistswelcomed his emphasis on markets and efficiency.
In addition, Modi called on a vast network of Indian-Americans, who
cheered his success at putting India on the world stage. The Obama
Administration quietly dropped the visa ban. When Modi met Obama, not
long after taking office, the two visited the memorial to Martin Luther
King, Jr., a man Modi claimed to admire. During his stay, Modi had a
dinner meeting with Obama, but he presented White House chefs with a
dilemma: he was fasting for Navaratri, a Hindu festival. At the meeting,
he consumed only water.
The Indian political commentator, who met
with Modi during his first term, told me that in person he was intense
and inquisitive but not restless; he joked about the monkeys that were
marauding his garden, and happily discussed the arcana of projects that
were occupying his attention. The main one was water: India’s
groundwater reserves were declining quickly (they’ve gone down by
sixty-one per cent in the past decade), and Modi was trying to prepare
for a future in which the country could run dry. During the meeting, he
also displayed a detailed list of nations that were in need of various
professionals—lawyers, engineers, doctors—of the very kind that India,
with its huge population of graduates, could provide. “He is smart,
extremely focussed,” the commentator said. “And, yes, a bit
puritanical.”
Not long after Modi took power, the Sohrabuddin
Sheikh case, in which his old friend Amit Shah was implicated, ground to
a halt. By 2014, Shah had essentially stopped showing up for hearings.
When the judge ordered Shah to appear, the case was taken away from him,
in defiance of the Supreme Court.
The new judge, Brijgopal Loya,
also complained about Shah’s failure to show up in court. He told his
family and friends that he was under “great pressure” to dismiss the
case, and that the chief justice of the Bombay High Court had offered
him sixteen million dollars to scuttle it. (The chief justice could not
be reached for comment.) Loya died not long after, in mysterious
circumstances. The coroner’s report said that he had suffered a heart
attack, but, according to The Caravan, a leading Indian news magazine, details in the report appeared to have been falsified.
The arrangements for Loya’s body to be returned to his family were made
not by government officials but by a member of the R.S.S.; it arrived
spattered in blood. Loya’s family asked for an official investigation
into his death but has not received one.
Shah’s
case was given to a third judge, M. B. Gosavi, who after less than a
month dismissed all charges, saying that he found “no sufficient ground
to proceed.” Subsequent efforts to hold anyone accountable for
Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s death came to nothing. As the trial of the
remaining defendants approached, ninety-two witnesses turned against the
prosecution, with some saying they feared for their lives; the
defendants were acquitted. Rajnish Rai, the officer tasked with
investigating Shah, was transferred off the case. When he applied for
early retirement, he was suspended.
By the time the charges were
dropped, Modi had installed Shah as president of the B.J.P. and chairman
of the governing coalition—effectively making him the country’s second
most powerful man.
In
2016, after four years of trying to find a publisher for her book,
Ayyub decided to publish it herself. To pay for it, she sold the gold
jewelry that her mother had been saving for her wedding. “I wasn’t
getting married anytime soon anyway,” she told me, laughing. She found a
printer willing to reproduce the manuscript without reading it first,
and cut a deal with a book distributor to share any profits. She
persuaded an artist friend to design an appropriately ominous cover.
Ayyub was protected by the fact that, as an English-language book, it
would be read only by India’s élite, too small a group to concern the
B.J.P. That May, the book went on sale on Amazon and in bookstores
around the country. She called it “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.”
“Gujarat
Files” relates the highlights of the discussions Ayyub had with senior
officials as she tried to figure out what happened during Modi’s and
Shah’s time presiding over the state. It is not a polished work; it reads
like a pamphlet for political insiders, rushed into publication by
someone with no time to check punctuation or spell out abbreviations or
delve into the historical background of the cases discussed. “I didn’t
have the resources to think about all that,” Ayyub told me. “I just
wanted to get the story out.” The virtue of the book is that it feels
like being present at a cocktail party of Hindu nationalists, speaking
frankly about long-suppressed secrets. “Here is the thing,” Ayyub said.
“Everybody has heard the truth—but you can’t be sure. With my book, you
can hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
Among
those whom Ayyub “stung” was Ashok Narayan, who had been Gujarat’s Home
Secretary during the riots. According to Ayyub, Narayan said that Modi
had decided to allow the Hindu nationalists to parade the bodies of the
victims of the train attack. Narayan said that he had warned Modi,
“Things will go out of hand,” but to no avail. When he resisted, Modi
went around him. “Bringing the bodies to Ahmedabad flared up the whole
thing, but he is the one who took the decision,” he said.
Narayan
added that the V.H.P.—the religious arm of the R.S.S.—had made
preparations for large-scale attacks on the Muslim community and was
merely looking for a pretext. “It was all planned by the V.H.P.—it was
gruesome,” Narayan said, adding that he believed Modi was in on the plan
from the beginning. “He knew everything.”
G. C. Raigar,
a senior police official, told Ayyub that the initial plan was to allow
the Hindus to take limited revenge for the attack. But, he said, the
violence spread so quickly that Modi’s government could no longer stop
it: “They didn’t want to use force against the rioters—which is why
things went out of control.”
Raigar, among others, told Ayyub that
the decision to allow reprisals against Muslims was communicated
outside the normal chain of command, from officials around Modi to
police officers who were thought to harbor sectarian animosities. “They
would tell it to people they had obliged in the past,” Raigar said of
the officials. “They would know who would help them.”
Some of the
officials spoke of the killings in a remarkably casual way, as if the
Muslims had deserved to be murdered. “There were riots in ’85, ’87, ’89,
’92, and most of the times the Hindus got a beating—and the Muslims got
an upper hand,” P. C. Pande, Ahmedabad’s former police commissioner,
said. “So this time, in 2002, it had to happen, it was the retaliation
of Hindus.”
Pande guided Ayyub through his rationale: “Here is a
group of Muslims going and setting fire on a train—so what will be your
reaction?”
“You hit them back?” she said.
“And then voilà! The same leaf you just raked up.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
“Yes,
you hit them back,” Pande said. “Here is the chance, give it back to
them. . . . Why should anybody mind?” Conversations like that, Ayyub
wrote, convinced her that the riots had happened because people in power
wanted them to: “It was as if the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle
were beginning to emerge.”
Several
officers also said that Shah had presided over extrajudicial
killings—including those of the alleged assassin Sohrabuddin Sheikh and
the witnesses to his murder. The conversations about Shah strengthened
Ayyub’s conviction that many more criminal suspects had been eliminated
in a similar way. “It was clear that the encounters were only the tip of
the iceberg,” she wrote.
Initially, the reaction to Ayyub’s book
was muted. There was a reception in New Delhi, attended by most of the
country’s major political writers and editors—but Ayyub couldn’t find a
word about it in any paper the next day. Newspapers were slow to review
the book. But it took off on its own, especially on Amazon, helped by
Ayyub’s reputation as a journalist. The release of a Hindi edition, in
2017, opened up a huge potential audience.
To date, Ayyub says,
“Gujarat Files” has sold six hundred thousand copies and been translated
into thirteen languages. Ayyub has been invited to speak at the United
Nations and at journalism conferences around the world. “What makes it
compelling is knowing that these are the biggest players in what
happened,” Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of The Caravan,
told me. “They are speaking in unguarded moments, and they are
confirming and adding to the knowledge of what we have already from
every other source so far. But never from this much on the inside. And
suddenly we put a speaker right in the heart of the room with the people
who know everything.”
Perhaps the main factor that made “Gujarat
Files” a sensation was the climate in which it appeared. By 2016, two
years into Modi’s first term, he was in the midst of a campaign to crush
any voice that challenged the new order.
In
April, 2018, Ayyub was sitting with a friend in a Delhi restaurant when
a source alerted her to a video that was appearing in online chat
groups maintained by B.J.P. supporters. He sent her the clip, and she
pressed Play. What appeared on her screen was a pornographic video
purporting to show Ayyub engaging in various sex acts. “I burst into
tears and threw up,” she said.
The clip went viral, making its way
from WhatsApp to Facebook to Twitter, retweeted and shared countless
times. Ayyub was inundated with angry messages, often with the video
attached. “Hello bitch,” a man named Himanshu Verma wrote in a direct
message on Facebook. “Plz suck my penis too.”
The video was the
crudest salvo in a media campaign that started soon after the
publication of Ayyub’s book. A tweet with a fake quote from her, asking
for leniency for Muslims who had raped children, went viral. Other
falsified tweets followed, including one in which she declared her
hatred of India. In response, someone named Vijay Singh Chauhan wrote,
“Don’t ever let me see you, or we’ll tell the whole world what we do to
whores like you. Pack your bag and go to back to Pakistan.”
India’s
female journalists are often subjected to an especially ugly form of
abuse. The threats that Ayyub received were nearly identical to those
sent to Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and book publisher from the southern
state of Karnataka. Like Ayyub, Lankesh had reported aggressively on
Hindu nationalism and on violence against women and lower-caste people.
She had also published Ayyub’s book in Kannada, the predominant language
in the state. “We were like sisters,” Ayyub told me. In September,
2017, after Lankesh endured a prolonged campaign of online attacks, two
men shot her dead outside her home and fled on a motorbike.
Neha
Dixit, who has done groundbreaking reporting on the B.J.P., told me
that she receives death threats and sexual insults constantly: “Every
day, I get three hundred notifications, with dick pics, and with
conversations about how they should rape me with a steel rod or a rose
thornbush or something like that.” For Dixit and other targets of these
campaigns, it is especially galling that the abuse is apparently
endorsed by prominent Modi allies. Ayyub showed me a tweet about the
porn video from Vaibhav Aggarwal, a media personality who often speaks
on behalf of the B.J.P. It read, “U want to dance in the Rain, get all
wet & not want to then have pneumonia”—a suggestion that she
deserved whatever abuse she got. In June, the fake Ayyub quote about
child rape was retweeted by a prominent B.J.P. member named Ashoke
Pandit. The quote, which originated in English, was translated into
Hindi on a Facebook page for the so-called Army of Yogi
Adityanath—admirers of the B.J.P.’s Chief Minister in the state of Uttar
Pradesh.
Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer and the founder
of Alt News, which tracks online disinformation, described a nimble
social-media operation that works on behalf of the B.J.P. In 2017, his
group made a typical discovery, when a pro-B.J.P. Web site called
Hindutva.info released a video of a gruesome stabbing, which was passed
around on social media as evidence that Muslims were killing Hindus in
Kerala. Puneet Sharma, an R.S.S. apparatchik whom Modi follows on
Twitter, promoted the video, saying that it should make Hindus’ “blood
boil.” But, when Alt News tracked the video to its source, it turned out
to depict a gang killing in Mexico.
Sinha told me he believes
that some of the most aggressive social-media posts are instigated by an
unofficial “I.T. cell,” staffed and funded by B.J.P. loyalists. He said
that people affiliated with the B.J.P. maintain Web sites that push
pro-Modi propaganda and attack his enemies. “They are organized and
quick,” he said. “They got their act down a long time ago, in Gujarat.”
As
Modi consolidated his hold on the government, he used its power to
silence mainstream outlets. In 2016, his administration began moving to
crush the television news network NDTV. Since it went on the air, in
1988, the station has been one of the liveliest and most credible news
channels; this spring, as votes were tallied in the general election,
its Web site received 16.5 billion hits in a single day. According to
two people familiar with the situation, Modi’s administration has pulled
nearly all government advertising from the network—one of its primary
sources of revenue—and members of his Cabinet have pressured private
companies to stop buying ads. NDTV recently laid off some four hundred
employees, a quarter of its staff. The journalists who remain say that
they don’t know how long they can persist. “These are dark times,” one
told me.
That year, Karan Thapar, the journalist who had asked
Modi whether he wanted to express remorse for the Gujarat riots, found
that no one from the B.J.P. would appear on his nightly show any longer.
Thapar, perhaps the country’s most prominent television journalist, was
suddenly unable to meaningfully cover politics. Then he discovered that
Modi’s Cabinet members were pushing his bosses to take him off the air.
“They make you toxic,” Thapar told me. “These are not things that are
put in writing. They’re conversations—‘We think it’s not a good idea to
have him around.’ ” (His network, India Today, denies being influenced
by “external pressures.”) In 2017, his employers expressed reluctance to
renew his contract, so he left the network.
Modi’s government has targeted enterprising editors as well. Last year, Bobby Ghosh, the editor of the Hindustan Times, one of the country’s most respected newspapers, ran a series tracking violence against Muslims. Modi met privately with the Times’ owner, and the next day Ghosh was asked to leave. In 2016, Outlook
ran a disturbing investigation by Neha Dixit, revealing that the R.S.S.
had offered schooling to dozens of disadvantaged children in the state
of Assam, and then sent them to be indoctrinated in Hindu-nationalist camps on the other side of the country. According to a person with knowledge of the situation, Outlook’s
owners—one of India’s wealthiest families, whose businesses depended on
government approvals—came under pressure from Modi’s administration.
“They were going to ruin their empire,” the person said. Not long after,
Krishna Prasad, Outlook’s longtime editor, resigned.
Both
Ayyub and Dixit said that no mainstream publication would sponsor their
work. “So many of the really good reporters in India are freelance,”
Ayyub told me. “There’s nowhere to go.” Even news that ought to cause
scandal has little effect. In June, the Business Standard reported that Modi’s government had been inflating
G.D.P.-growth figures by a factor of nearly two. The report prompted a
public outcry, but Modi did not apologize, and no official was forced to
resign.
Only a few small outfits regularly offer aggressive coverage. The most prominent of them, The Caravan
and a news site called the Wire, employ a total of about seventy
journalists—barely enough to cover a large city, let alone a country of
more than a billion people. In 2017, after the Wire ran a story
examining questionable business dealings by Amit Shah’s son, Modi’s
ministers began pressuring donors who sustain the site to stop providing
funding. Shah’s son, who denied the allegations, also filed a lawsuit,
which has been costly to defend. Siddharth Varadarajan, the site’s
founding editor, told me that he is battling not only the government but
also the compliant media. “We reckon that people in this country very
much value their freedoms and democracy—and that they will realize when
their freedoms are being eroded,” he said. “But a huge section of the
media is busy telling them something entirely different.”
Modi’s
supporters often get their news from Republic TV, which features
shouting matches, public shamings, and scathing insults of all but the
most slavish Modi partisans; next to it, Fox News resembles the BBC’s
“Newshour.” Founded in 2017 with B.J.P. support, Republic TV stars Arnab
Goswami, a floppy-haired Oxford graduate who acts as a kind of public
scourge for opponents of Modi’s initiatives. In a typical program, from
2017, Goswami mentioned a law mandating that movie theatres play the
national anthem, and asked whether people should be required to stand;
his guest Waris Pathan, a Muslim assemblyman, argued that it should be a
matter of choice. “Why can’t you stand up?” Goswami shouted at Pathan.
Before Pathan could get out an answer, he yelled again, “Why can’t you
stand up? What’s your problem with it?” Pathan kept trying, but Goswami,
his hair flying, shouted over him. “I’ll tell you why, because—I’ll
tell you why. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you why. Can I tell you? Then why
don’t you stop, and I’ll tell you why? Don’t be an anti-national! Don’t
be an anti-national! Don’t be an anti-national!”
The lack of
journalistic scrutiny has given Modi immense freedom to control the
narrative. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the months leading up
to his reëlection, in 2019. Backed by his allies in business, Modi ran a
campaign that was said to cost some five billion dollars. (Its exact
cost is unknown, owing to weak campaign-finance laws.) As the vote
approached, though, Modi was losing momentum, hampered by an
underperforming economy. On February 14th, a suicide bomber crashed a
car laden with explosives into an Indian military convoy in Kashmir,
killing forty soldiers. The attack energized Modi: he gave a series of
bellicose speeches, insisting, “The blood of the people is boiling!” He
blamed the attack on Pakistan, India’s archrival, and sent thousands of
troops into Kashmir. The B.J.P.’s supporters launched a social-media
blitz, attacking Pakistan and hailing Modi as “a tiger.” One viral
social-media post contained a telephone recording of Modi consoling a
widow; it turned out that the recording had been made in 2013.
On
February 26th, Modi ordered air strikes against what he claimed was a
training camp for militants in the town of Balakot. Sympathetic outlets
described a momentous victory: they pumped out images of a devastated
landscape, and, citing official sources, claimed that three hundred
militants had been killed. But Western reporters visiting the site found
no evidence of any deaths; there were only a handful of craters, a
slightly damaged house, and some fallen trees. Many of the pro-Modi
posts turned out to be crude fabrications. Pratik Sinha, of Alt News,
pointed out that photos claiming to depict dead Pakistani militants
actually showed victims of a heat wave; other images, ostensibly of the
strikes, were cribbed from a video game called Arma 2.
“I know I should have gotten a cart, but I can’t give up now.”
Cartoon by Caitlin Cass
But,
in a country where hundreds of millions of people are illiterate or
nearly so, the big idea got through. Modi rose in the polls and coasted
to victory. The B.J.P. won a majority in the lower house of parliament,
making Modi the most powerful Prime Minister in decades. Amit Shah,
Modi’s deputy, told a group of election workers that the Party’s
social-media networks were an unstoppable force. “Do you understand what
I’m saying?” he said. “We are capable of delivering any message we want
to the public—whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”
For
many, Modi’s reëlection suggested that he had uncovered a terrible
secret at the heart of Indian society: by deploying vicious sectarian
rhetoric, the country’s leader could persuade Hindus to give him nearly
unchecked power. In the following months, Modi’s government introduced a
series of extraordinary initiatives meant to solidify Hindu dominance.
The most notable of them, along with revoking the special status of
Kashmir, was a measure designed to strip citizenship from as many as two
million residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed the
border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before. In
September, the government began constructing detention centers for
residents who had become illegal overnight.
A feeling of despair
has settled in among many Indians who remain committed to the secular,
inclusive vision of the country’s founders. “Gandhi and Nehru were
great, historic figures, but I think they were an aberration,” Prasad,
the former Outlook editor, told me. “It’s very different now.
The institutions have crumbled—universities, investigative agencies, the
courts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services. And I
think there is no rational answer for what has happened, except that we
pretended to be what we were for fifty, sixty years. But we are now
reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummel minorities,
to push them into a corner, to show them their places, to conquer
Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants of the
state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is
becoming the country it has always wanted to be.”
On
March 31, 2017, a Muslim dairy farmer named Pehlu Khan drove to the
city of Jaipur with several relatives, to buy a pair of cows for his
business. On the way home, a line of men blocked the road, surrounded
his truck, and accused him of planning to sell the cows for meat. Cows
are considered sacred by Hindus, and most Indian states forbid killing
them. But it is generally legal to eat beef from cows that have died
naturally, and to make leather from their hide—jobs often performed by
Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, leaving them open to false accusations.
The men pulled Khan and his relatives from the truck and began beating
them and shouting anti-Muslim epithets. “We showed them our papers for
the cow purchase, but it did not matter,” Ajmat, a nephew, said. Khan
was taken to a hospital, where he died soon afterward.
Khan’s
relatives identified nine attackers. Most of them were members of
Bajrang Dal, a branch of the R.S.S. Ostensibly a youth group, Bajrang
Dal often provides muscle and security for B.J.P. members. It has also
been implicated in a rash of murders of Muslims throughout the country.
In
Jaipur, I met Ashok Singh, the head of the Rajasthan chapter of Bajrang
Dal. Singh told me that he and his men were duty-bound to defend cows
from an epidemic of theft and killing. For several minutes, he spoke
about the holiness of the cow. Each animal, he said, contains three
hundred and sixty million gods, and even its dung has elixirs beneficial
to humans. “They cut them, they kill them,” Singh said of Muslims.
“It’s a conspiracy.” He admitted that Bajrang Dal members had taken part
in stopping Khan, but he insisted that other people had committed the
murder. “There was a mob,” he said. “We didn’t have control of it.”
The
attackers identified by Khan’s relatives were arrested and charged, but
local sentiment ran strongly in their favor. After the prosecutor
declined to introduce any eyewitness testimony or cell-phone videos into
evidence, all the attackers were acquitted. “The case was rigged,”
Kasim Khan, a lawyer for the family, told me. “The outcome was decided
before the trial.”
According to FactChecker, an organization that
tracks communal violence by surveying media reports, there have been
almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by religion in the past
decade—almost all of them since Modi became Prime Minister. Hindu mobs
have killed dozens of Muslim men. The murders, which are often
instigated by Bajrang Dal members, have become known as “lynchings,”
evoking the terror that swept the American South after Reconstruction.
The lynchings take place against a backdrop of hysteria created by the
R.S.S. and its allies—a paranoid narrative of a vast majority, nearly a
billion strong, being victimized by a much smaller minority.
When
Muslims are lynched, Modi typically says nothing, and, since he rarely
holds press conferences, he is almost never asked about them. But his
supporters often salute the killers. In June, 2017, a Muslim man named
Alimuddin Ansari, who was accused of cow trafficking, was beaten to
death in the village of Ramgarh. Eleven men, including a local leader of
the B.J.P., were convicted of murder, but last July they were freed,
pending appeal. On their release, eight of them were met by Jayant
Sinha, the B.J.P. Minister for Civil Aviation. Sinha, a Harvard graduate
and a former consultant for McKinsey & Company, draped the men in
marigold garlands and presented them with sweets. “All I am doing is
honoring the due process of law,” he said at the time.
In northern
India, Hindu nationalists have whipped up panic around the idea that
Muslim men are engaging in a secret campaign to seduce Hindu women into
marriage and prostitution. As with the hysteria over cow killings, the
furor takes form mostly on social media and platforms like WhatsApp,
where rumors spread indiscriminately. The idea—known as “love jihad”—is
rooted in an image of the oversexed Muslim male, fortified by beef and
preying on desirable Hindu women. In many areas, any Muslim man seen
with a Hindu woman risks being attacked. Two years ago, Yogi Adityanath,
the B.J.P. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, set up “anti-Romeo squads,”
which harassed Muslim men believed to be trying to seduce Hindu women.
The squads were abandoned after the gangs mistakenly beat up several
Hindu men.
In a village in Haryana, I spoke with a young Hindu
woman named Ayesha. A year before, she had met a Muslim man named Omar, a
purveyor of spiritual medicine who had been visiting her home to treat
her mother. They fell in love, and decided that Ayesha would convert to
Islam and they would get married. Her family was horrified, she said.
One night, Ayesha ran off with Omar to his village, a few miles away,
where they got married in a mosque, and moved in with his relatives. For
several months, Ayesha said, her family tried to persuade her to get a
divorce; at one point, her father brought her a pistol and a suicide
note to sign. “I was so sad, I almost agreed,” she said.
One
night, as Omar rode his bicycle, two men followed on scooters. One of
them pulled out a gun and shot Omar dead. Ayesha remained with Omar’s
family, saying she will never go back to her own. “I am one hundred per
cent certain that my family is responsible for my husband’s death,” she
said.
When
Ayyub was a child, a group of men gathered every morning for prayer and
martial arts in a field down the street from her home. The men formed a
local chapter of the R.S.S., and sometimes chanted slogans celebrating
Hindu supremacy: “Hail, Mother India.” The men were friendly, she
recalled—eager to recruit Muslims. But she had learned in school that an
R.S.S. acolyte had killed Gandhi, so she and her brother, Aref, kept
their distance. “We would watch with fascination,’’ she said. “But I
didn’t like being there.”
Early
one morning in Ahmedabad, on a playground at Ellisbridge Municipal
School No. 12, I looked on as a dozen men raised the saffron flag of the
R.S.S. They ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-three, and were all
trim and fit, many of them wearing the group’s signature khaki shorts.
They began with yoga poses and calisthenics. Then they took out long
wooden rods and began to perform martial exercises. (An R.S.S. chief
once said that the group’s cadres could be assembled to fight more
quickly than the Indian Army.) The men moved together, stepping and
striking in formation. “One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four,” their
leader cried. “Don’t think you’re an expert—I’m seeing a lot of
mistakes.”
The
men finished in a semicircle on the ground, offering prayers to the
Hindu sun god: “O Surya, the shining one, the radiant one, dispeller of
darkness, source of life.” They ended by shouting, “Victory to India!”
Afterward,
the men—who included an engineer, a lawyer, a garment merchant, and a
police officer—laughed and clapped one another on the back. Together
they made up the Paldi chapter of the R.S.S., one of more than thirty
thousand across India. Paldi is an overwhelmingly Hindu neighborhood,
but the nearest Muslim enclave, which came under attack in 2002, is less
than a mile away. On this morning, there wasn’t much talk of politics.
“I’m just here to stay fit,” Nehal Burasin, a student, told me.
For
a fuller explanation of the R.S.S.’s world view, I spoke to Sudhanshu
Trivedi, a lifelong member who is now the B.J.P.’s national spokesman.
Over dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Delhi, Trivedi told me that the
R.S.S. is dedicated to the propagation of “Hindutva”: the idea that
India is first and foremost a nation for Hindus. It is, he said, by far
the largest organization of its kind in the world. In its
ninety-four-year existence, the R.S.S. has embedded itself in every
aspect of Indian society.
Between bites of salad, Trivedi rattled
off R.S.S. talking points. The organization says that it runs some
thirty thousand primary and secondary schools; that it administers
hospitals across India, especially in remote areas; and that it
maintains the second-largest network of trade unions in the country, the
largest network of farmers, the largest social-welfare organization
working in the slums. The B.J.P., India’s dominant political party, came
last in his litany. “So, you can see, in the entire scheme of things,
compared to what the R.S.S. is doing, what the B.J.P. is doing is
small,” he said. In fact, the R.S.S. was rapidly becoming a state within
a state—capturing India from within. Over the summer, the organization
announced that it was establishing a school to train young people to
become officers in the armed forces. This year, more than a hundred and
fifty former officers and enlisted men signed a letter decrying the
“completely unacceptable” use of the military for political purposes.
They referred to Modi’s taking credit for the cross-border strikes in
Pakistan, and to the boast by some B.J.P. politicians that it was
“Modi’s army.”
The key to understanding modern India, Trivedi told
me, was accepting that “Hinduism is not basically a religion—it is a
way of life.” Anyone born in India is part of Hinduism. Therefore, all
the other religions found in India thrive because of Hinduism, and are
subordinate to it. “The culture of Islam is preserved here because of
Hindu civilization,” he said.
Cartoon by Liana Finck
As part of the Hindutva project, B.J.P. leaders have been rewriting
school textbooks across the country, erasing much of its Islamic
history, including that of the Mughals, Muslim emperors who ruled India
for three centuries. The B.J.P. has changed
Mughal place names to ones that are Hindu-influenced. Last year, the
Mughalsarai railway station, built in central India a century and a half
ago, was renamed for Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, a right-wing
Hindu-nationalist leader. Allahabad, a city of more than a million
people, is now called Prayagraj, a Sanskrit word that denotes a place of
sacrifice. In November, the old story of Ayodhya was in the news again,
when India’s Supreme Court cleared the way for a Hindu temple to be
constructed on the former site of Babri Masjid. In a thousand-page
decision, the Court provided no evidence that a temple had been
destroyed to build the mosque, and acknowledged that the mosque had been
torn down by an angry mob. Nevertheless, it handed control of the land
to a government trust, effectively allowing the B.J.P. to proceed.
Trivedi
told me that no one in the R.S.S. bore any animus toward Islam. But, he
said, it was important to understand just how far the faith had fallen.
“In India, the most educated community is the Parsis, which is a
minority. The second most educated is the Christians, which is a
minority. The most prosperous is the Jains, which is a minority. The
most entrepreneurial is Sikh, which is a minority. The first nuclear
scientist in India was a Parsi—a minority,” he said. “Then what is the
problem with Muslims? I will tell you. They have become captives of the
jihadi ideology.”
When
Ayyub and the photographer were detained at the hospital in Srinagar, I
found a hiding place across the street, screened by a wall and a fruit
vender; Ayyub would have faced serious repercussions if she was found to
have snuck in a foreigner. After about an hour, they emerged. Ayyub
said that an intelligence officer had questioned them intently, then
released them with an admonition: “Don’t come back.”
The
next morning, we drove to the village of Parigam, near the site of the
suicide attack that prompted Modi’s air strikes against Pakistan. We’d
heard that Indian security forces had swept through the town and
detained several men. The insurgency has broad support in the villages
outside the capital, and the road to Parigam was marked by the sandbags
and razor wire of Indian Army checkpoints. For most of the way, the
roads were otherwise deserted.
In the village, Ayyub stopped the
car to chat with locals. Within a few minutes, she’d figured out whom we
should talk to first: Shabbir Ahmed, the proprietor of a local bakery.
We found him sitting cross-legged on his porch, shelling almonds into a
huge pile. In interviews, Ayyub slows down from her usual debate-team
pace; she took a spot on the porch as if she had dropped by for a visit.
Ahmed, who is fifty-five, told her that, during the sweeps, an armored
vehicle rumbled up to his home just past midnight one night. A dozen
soldiers from the Rashtriya Rifles, an élite counter-insurgency unit of
the Indian Army, rushed out and began smashing his windows. When Ahmed
and his two sons came outside, he said, the soldiers hauled the young
men into the street and began beating them. “I was screaming for help,
but nobody came out,” Ahmed said. “Everyone was too afraid.”
Ahmed’s
sons joined us on the porch. One of them, Muzaffar, said that the
soldiers had been enraged by young people who throw rocks at their
patrols. They dragged Muzaffar down the street toward a mosque. “Throw
stones at the mosque like you throw stones at us,” one of the soldiers
commanded him.
Muzaffar
said that he and his brother, Ali, were taken to a local base, where
the soldiers shackled them to chairs and beat them with bamboo rods.
“They kept asking me, ‘Do you know any stone throwers?’—and I kept
saying I don’t know any, but they kept beating me,” he said. When
Muzaffar fainted, he said, a soldier attached electrodes to his legs and
stomach and jolted him with an electrical current. Muzaffar rolled up
his pants to reveal patches of burned skin on the back of his leg. It
went on like that for some time, he said: he would pass out, and when he
regained consciousness the beating started again. “My body was going
into spasms,” he said, and began to cry.
After Muzaffar and Ali
were released, their father took them to the local hospital. “They have
broken my bones,” Muzaffar said. “I can no longer prostrate myself
before God.”
It was impossible to verify the brothers’ tale, but,
as with many accounts that Ayyub and I heard in the valley, the anguish
was persuasive. “I am a slightly more civilized version of these
people,” Ayyub told me. “I see what’s happening—with the propaganda,
with the lies, what the government is doing to people. Their issues are
way more extensive—their lives. But I have everything in common with
these people. I feel their pain.”
One afternoon, Ayyub and I
walked through Soura, a hardscrabble neighborhood in Srinagar’s old city
which has been the site of several confrontations with security forces.
By the time we got there, the police and the Army had withdrawn,
evidently deciding that the narrow streets left their men too
vulnerable. The locals told us that they regarded Soura as liberated
territory and vowed to attack anyone from the government who tried to
enter. Every wall seemed plastered with graffiti. One bit of scrawl
said, “Demographic change is not acceptable!”
The Kashmiris we met
felt trapped, their voices stifled. “The news that is true—they never
show it,” Yunus, a shop owner, said of the Indian media. Days before,
his thirteen-year-old son, Ashiq, had been arrested and beaten by
security forces, just as he himself had been thirty years before.
“Nobody has ever asked the people of Kashmir what they want—whether to
stay with India or join Pakistan or become independent,” he said. “We
have heard so many promises. We have lifted bodies with our hands,
lifted heads that are separate, lifted legs that are separate, and put
them all together into graves.”
Many
Kashmiris still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recall
the promise, made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite would
determine the future of the state. Kashmir was assigned special
status—enshrined in Article 370—and afforded significant powers of
self-rule. For the most part, those powers have never been realized.
Beginning in the late eighties, an armed insurgency, supported by
Pakistan, has turned the area into a battleground. The conflict in
Kashmir is largely a war of ambush and reprisal; the insurgents strike
the Indian security forces, and the security forces crack down. Groups
like Human Rights Watch have detailed abuses on both sides, but especially by the Indian government.
The
R.S.S. and other Hindu nationalists have claimed that the efforts to
assuage the Kashmiris created a self-defeating dynamic. The insurgency
has stifled economic development, they said; Article 370 was curtailing
investment and migration, dooming the place to backwardness. Modi’s
decision to revoke the article seemed the logical endpoint of the R.S.S.
world view: the Kashmiri deadlock would be broken by overwhelming Hindu
power.
As Ayyub and I drove around Kashmir, it seemed unclear how
the Indian government intended to proceed. Economic activity had ground
to a halt. Schools were closed. Kashmiris were cut off from the outside
world and from one another. “We are overwhelmed by cases of
depression,” a physician in Srinagar told us. Many Kashmiris warned that
an explosion was likely the moment the security measures were lifted.
“Modi is doing what he did in Gujarat twenty years ago, when he ran a
tractor over the Muslims there,” a woman named Dushdaya said.
The
newspaper columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that, in Kashmir, “Indian
democracy is failing.” He suggested that the country’s Muslims, who have
largely resisted radicalization, would conclude that they had nothing
else to turn to. “The B.J.P. thinks it is going to Indianise Kashmir,”
he wrote. “Instead, what we will see is potentially the Kashmirisation
of India: The story of Indian democracy written in blood and betrayal.”
In
Srinagar, Ayyub and I visited the neighborhood of Mehju Nagar, which
many young men have left to join the militants. The talk on the street
was of a couple named Nazeer and Fehmeeda, whose son, Momin, had been
taken away in the crackdown. Armed men from the Central Reserve Police
Force came to the door late one night. A masked civilian—evidently an
informer—pointed at Momin. The soldiers took him away.
We found
Fehmeeda at her house, kneeling on the floor of an unadorned main room.
The morning after the raid, she told us, she went to a C.R.P.F. base,
where her son was being held. He told her that he’d been beaten. “I
begged them to give him back to me, but they wouldn’t consider it,” she
said. When Fehmeeda returned the following day, the police told her that
Momin had been transferred to the city’s central jail. But guards there
said that he’d been transferred to a prison in Uttar Pradesh, on the
other side of the country. “There’s no use crying, Auntie,” they told
her.
Fehmeeda said that she was not told what charges had been
filed against Momin; Indian antiterrorism law allows the security forces
to detain any Kashmiri for any reason, or no reason, for up to two
years. In the three decades that Kashmir has been in open rebellion,
tens of thousands of men have disappeared, and many have not returned.
“I must accept that I will not see him again,” she said.
At
Fehmeeda’s house, her friends had gathered around her, while men from
the neighborhood stood outside open windows. Ayyub sat facing her, their
knees touching. As Fehmeeda spoke, some of the men talked over her, and
each time Ayyub told them to shut up: “Don’t scold her, Uncle, she has
problems of her own.”
Fehmeeda
had begun stoically, but gradually she lost her composure. Ayyub
gripped her hands and said, “Your son will return to you. God is very
big.” Fehmeeda was not consoled. Momin, a construction worker, had paid
for the entire family’s needs, including her medicine for a kidney
ailment. Fehmeeda’s thoughts began to tumble out in fragments: “I told
him, don’t throw stones, somebody took him, somebody was paid—” Then she
started to sob and heave. Ayyub began to cry, too. “I can’t take any
more,” she said. “This is too much.”
Ayyub said goodbye to
Fehmeeda, promising to return with medicine for her kidneys. (A few
weeks later, she did.) We were both gripped by a sense of foreboding,
that we were witnessing the start of something that would last many
years. “I feel this as a Muslim,” Ayyub said. “It’s happening everywhere
in India.”
We rode in silence for a while. I suggested that maybe
it was time for her to leave India—that Muslims didn’t have a future
there. But Ayyub was going through a notebook. “I’m not leaving,” she
said. “I have to stay. I’m going to write all this down and tell
everyone what happened.” ♦
India election 2019: The mystery of India's 'missing' Muslim politicians
image captionIndian Muslim have been enfeebled by shrinking political representation
India
has the world's second largest Muslim population, but there are very
few lawmakers from the community. The BBC's Priyanka Pathak reports on
the community's shrinking political representation.
On
a recent warm morning in Madhubani, a constituency in the eastern state
of Bihar, political workers, local businessmen and activists gathered
around Shakeel Ahmad in a narrow lane.
Soon
after, Mr Ahmad, who is contesting for the seat, sped away in his white
motorcade - into a dusty lane and onto yet another blistering day of
campaigning.
The
63-year-old is a former member of the main opposition Congress party.
But in April, when the party announced that it would not field him as a
candidate in Madhubani, he did something unprecedented.
He
resigned, ending his decades-long association with the Congress. He
then filed his nomination as an independent candidate from the same
seat, which he has won twice before.
It
was a startling decision - and one that was spurred by widespread
Muslim support. It revealed the resentment and frustration among Indian
Muslims who are increasingly concerned about their shrinking political
representation.
The
governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fielded just seven Muslim
candidates in the ongoing general election - it's contesting 437 seats
in the 545-member lower house of parliament. It had fielded the same
seven candidates in 2014 too, but none of them won. It was the first
time in India's history that the government had no Muslim members of
parliament.
In
the 2014 election, Congress contested 464 seats but fielded just 31
Muslim candidates - of those, only seven won. Much hasn't changed in
this election - only 32 of the party's 423 candidates are Muslim.
The
Congress' decision not to field Mr Ahmad - a senior party spokesperson -
was surprising. He is no ordinary candidate. He had served as the
party's general secretary and as a junior minister when Congress was in
power; his father and grandfather were both Congress leaders and
lawmakers in Bihar's state assembly.
"Shakeel
Ahmad, who has been such a big Congress leader, has to beg for his own
seat. He is being brave now but he should have left long ago. Only
Muslims can make Congress win," said Maulana Anisur Rahman Quasmi,
secretary of Imarat Shariah, a socio-religious Islamic organisation in
Bihar. "This is a conspiracy against us. You [Congress] tell Muslims to
vote for you but you don't give them tickets."
Congress
has long pitched itself as a secular party that represents the
interests of minorities - and is therefore distinct from the Hindu
nationalist BJP. But this courtship of Muslim voters has not translated
into tickets for Muslim candidates. Of the more than 120 candidates
contesting in Bihar, only eight are Muslims.
image copyrightGetty Images
image captionMr Ahmad (c) had been Congress politician for some 30 years
"Keeping
in view the number of Muslim votes, the contribution and track record
of winning elections by Muslim leaders, one ticket must be given to a
Muslim leader either from Chandni Chowk or North-East Delhi
parliamentary seat," the letter said.
But Mr Gandhi ignored their plea. The party's list of candidates in Delhi does not include any Muslims.
Congress
has defended its ticket allocations - the party's national media
coordinator, Sanjeev Singh, told the BBC, "We have done what we could
and given tickets wherever it was possible to give. In fact we have
given [one] more ticket than we did in the 2014 election. But we are
also constrained by coalition politics."
Muslim
political representation is particularly relevant now because while the
community's population in India has more than doubled from 68 million
in 1981 to 172 million in 2011, the number of Muslim MPs has nearly
halved from 49 in 1980 to 22 in 2014.
Their
representation in parliament shrank from 9% in 1980 to 4% in 2014 - and
the gap between the Muslim population and parliamentary representation
increased from a mere 2% to 10% in that period.
This
has happened gradually and over decades. It is not, as many are quick
to suspect, just the result of a Hindu nationalist wave sparked by PM
Narendra Modi's landslide win in 2014.
Muslim
activists say their greater complaint is with the Congress for denying
them representation. "They have created such a terrible fear of the BJP
in Muslim minds that now, even if they don't give us a single ticket,
Muslims will not say a word against it," said Mustaqim Siddiqui, member
of United Muslim Political Empowerment.
image copyrightGetty Images
image captionMuslims make up about 15% of India's population
He
added that despite Muslim candidates not being given tickets, Congress
still appeals to them to consolidate their vote. "They tell us that if
they give tickets to Muslims, there will be polarisation of votes in
those constituencies. They also say that by not giving tickets to
Muslims, they are proving to the electorate that they are not indulging
in Muslim appeasement," Mr Siddiqui said.
Others point out that the Congress has ignored the internal dynamics and rifts within the Muslim community.
"The
national narrative is that caste has no place in Islam and that all
Muslims have only one political identity. It is ironic that Muslims are
expected to defeat vote bank politics by voting collectively," said
Hilal Ahmed, a professor of political Islam at the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies.
Muslims say they don't vote on their issues alone.
"Everyone
wants better streets, better schools and better jobs. But they are
making it all about religion. Shakeel Ahmad has done good work here, but
he is not given a ticket because he is Muslim. Such a thing is wrong,"
said Mohammad Qadri, a resident of Madhubani. "We did not hope for
anything from the BJP. But we had hopes from Congress."
And
yet, religious leaders said, they still exhort the community to vote
for Congress because they feel like there is no other choice. "We are
like the bonded labourer who may be technically free to leave, but
won't. As a community, our population has increased but our youth has no
vision, no education…so, like that bonded labourer, we will keep doing
(voting) like how our ancestors did," Maulana Quasmi said.
image copyrightGetty Images
Political
scientist Christopher Jaffrelot, whose research has examined who speaks
up for Muslims in the Indian parliament, said in a 2016 talk that it
was important to have "your people" represent your interests in elected
bodies because if not, "there will be less people in defence of the
minorities".
His
research had focused on questions and debates related to riots,
affirmative action and Muslim family law - and he said he had found that
more than 23% of all questions about Muslim issues were asked by Muslim
MPs. So just 4% of MPs were asking more than a fifth of the questions
about issues that affected India's Muslims.
Muslims
realise this. "We need someone to speak for us," said Ataurrahman
Ansari, a social activist in Madhubani. "Our [Muslim] weavers are forced
to leave their homes and go to Mumbai to look for work…who will speak
for us if they don't even give us a chance to run?".
Now Muslims are trying different ways to craft a long-term strategy to counter their marginalisation.
image copyrightGetty Images
For
one, Muslim voters are choosing to break away from the Congress and
vote for the BJP in Karnataka, West Bengal and Rajasthan, according to a
pre-poll survey that was conducted in March 2019.
And
then there are candidates such as Mr Ahmad, who make the case for
Muslim representation by breaking away from their party to contest
independently.
The
community is also hopeful that a new generation of Muslim leaders will
emerge - those who can lead the country, not just its Muslims.
"Muslims
should now think about taking that leadership instead of relying on
what is given to them by [political] parties," Maulana Qasm said.
"What
we need is leaders like at the time of independence - Muslim leaders
with vision and courage who belonged not only to Muslims but to the
whole country."
India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years
The
battle of Cawnpore - the entire British garrison died at Cawnpore (now
Kanpur), either in the battle or later massacred with women and
children. Their deaths became a war cry for the British. Photograph:
Hulton Archive/Getty
In War of Civilisations: India
AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues
that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost
10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the
world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its
most prized possession: India.
Conventional
histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were
slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of
rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order,
claims Misra.
The
author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history"
could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857.
This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing
less than the fate of the world hung in the balance.
"It
was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary
holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win
was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple
and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale
has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.
His
calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records
pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed -
either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving
out the British.
The third source involves
British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a
fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British
official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British
power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of
wretches seemed to have died."
There is a
macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident
Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses,
which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our
boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed
our women and children."
Misra's casualty
claims have been challenged in India and Britain. "It is very difficult
to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for
sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone
rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at
the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been
migration rather than murder that depopulated areas."
Many
view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British
historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said it was valid
to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of
thousands".
"It looks like an overestimate.
There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were
exacerbated by British ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or
talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track
record."
Others say Misra has done well to
unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed
out Indian versions of history. "There appears a prolonged silence
between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are
heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is
another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at
Delhi University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of
[William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have
to look for it."
What is not in doubt is that
in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless poet-king improbably descended from
Genghis Khan.
Neither is there much dispute
over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu,
who were stationed in the central Indian town of Meerut revolted and
killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels
proclaimed Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron
flag above the Red Fort.
What follows in
Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a
story of a people rising to throw off the imperial yoke. Critics say
the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into
thinking the officers were threatening their religious traditions. In
the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.
Misra's
analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across
India rather than accepting it was localised around northern India.
Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern
Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering Burma. "It was a
pan-Indian thing. No doubt."
Misra also claims
that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny
had fizzled away, countering the widely held view that the recapture of
Delhi was the last important battle.
For many
the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself
a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this in the context
of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south
Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship
with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an
embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached
nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national
story. That is a big change."
What they said
Charles Dickens:
"I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to
them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God,
to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
Karl Marx:
"The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India,
but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the
Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
L'Estaffette,
French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our
squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against
British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious
traditions of France."
The Guardian: "We
sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be
forgotten ... We may rely on native bayonets, but they must be officered
by Europeans."
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A video emerged from India in February 2020 showing five grievously
injured men lying on the street being beaten by several policemen and
forced to sing the Indian national anthem. The video was filmed on
February 24 in Kardampuri, a neighborhood in northeast Delhi. One of the
men, Faizan, a 23-year-old Muslim, died from his injuries two days
later.
At least 52 more people were killed in the three days of communal
violence that broke out in India’s capital. Over 200 were injured,
properties destroyed, and communities displaced in targeted attacks by
Hindu mobs. While a policeman and some Hindus were also killed, the
majority of victims were Muslim.
Muslims in India have been increasingly at risk since the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Prime
Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014. Faizan died in a
carnage amidst rising communal tensions in the country. On December 12,
2019, the Modi administration achieved passage of the discriminatory
Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). Under the act, for the first time in
India, religion is a basis for granting citizenship. The law
specifically fast-tracks asylum claims of non-Muslim irregular
immigrants from the neighboring Muslim-majority countries of
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The amended citizenship law,
coupled with the government’s push for a nationwide citizenship
verification process through a National Population Register (NPR) and a
proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), aimed at identifying
“illegal migrants,” has led to fears that millions of Indian Muslims,
including many families who have lived in the country for generations,
could be stripped of their citizenship rights and disenfranchised.
Throughout the country, Indians of all faiths have protested
peacefully against the law, singing songs, reciting poetry, and reading
aloud from the constitution, which commits to secularism and equality.
The iconic image of these protests was at Shaheen Bagh, a
Muslim-majority neighborhood in Delhi. Since it first began on December
15, the protest, which was led by local women, drew civil society
support from across the country. It also provoked the ire of the ruling
BJP, with some of its leaders deriding the protesters or more
dangerously calling them anti-national and pro-Pakistan. Some have
described the protesters as “Pakistani hooligans,” others led a chant to
“shoot the traitors,” inciting violence. On February 1, 2020, a man
fired two shots in the air near the protest site. On March 24,
authorities asked the protesters to disperse following the outbreak of
Coronavirus and calls for a lockdown to contain its spread.
Since the Modi administration first took office, BJP leaders have
repeatedly made Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim remarks in their
speeches and interviews. These have, at times, encouraged and even
incited violent attacks by party supporters who believe they have
political protection and approval. They have beaten Muslim men for
dating Hindu women. Mobs affiliated to the BJP have, since 2015, killed
and injured scores of members of religious minorities amid rumors that
they traded or killed cows for beef. In February 2019, BJP supporters
threatened and beat several Kashmiri Muslim students and traders,
apparently to avenge a militant attack on a security forces convoy.
Government policy has also reflected bias against Muslims. Since
October 2018, Indian authorities have deported over a dozen Rohingya
Muslims to Myanmar despite the risks to their lives and security. After
winning a second term in May 2019, the government revoked the
constitutional autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and
Kashmir, and, anticipating protests, deployed additional troops,
detained thousands, and cut off phone and internet connections. The
police have failed to intervene when BJP supporters engage in speech
inciting violence or mob attacks but are quick to arrest critics of the
government.
During protests against the citizenship law, there was a similarly
partisan response. In many cases, when BJP-affiliated groups attacked
protesters, the police did not intervene. However, in BJP-governed
states in December, police used excessive and unnecessary lethal force,
killing at least 30 people during protests and injuring scores more. In
Delhi in February, some policemen actively participated in the mob
attacks on Muslims.
The government’s Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim policies have
touched off protests not just in India but abroad. The government
crackdown on the protests in India raised further outcries. The United
States, the European Union, and the United Nations secretariat have all
called on the Modi government to scrap its discriminatory policies.
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, Indian authorities said the citizenship
verification plans had been indefinitely postponed.
Earlier, Indian diplomats tried to brush off international concern as
“internal matters,” and the BJP launched a public campaign to counter
attempts to “mislead the nation.” Prime Minister Modi has insisted that
these policies are not discriminatory, saying, “Muslims are a part of
our nation, and they have equal rights and duties as others.” However,
he has done little to initiate a dialogue with the protesters, rein in
his party members and supporters who routinely vilify Muslims, or press
state governments to prosecute those responsible for abuses.
Muslims, in particular, have raised concerns about the National
Register of Citizens because of the problems that have already occurred
in the northeastern state of Assam, which is the only state to have
completed such a verification process. It excluded nearly two million
people, most of them ethnic Bengalis, whom the authorities accuse of
entering India illegally from neighboring Bangladesh. After a surge in
migration to Assam during British colonial rule and around the 1947
partition and creation of Pakistan, the 1951 National Register of
Citizens was used to document these settlers. The August 2019 update to
verify Indian citizens in Assam was the outcome of a 1985 peace
agreement and a subsequent 2014 Supreme Court ruling to address
grievances, protests, and violence by Assamese groups over irregular
migration. In practice, the process was arbitrary and discriminatory,
particularly targeting Bengali Muslims, leading to concerns that similar
abuse and bias will be replicated when it is extended to the rest of
the country. A group of retired bureaucrats and officials in January
2020 publicly warned that the nationwide NRC process “has the scope to
be employed in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner, subject to local
pressures and to meet specific political objectives, not to mention the
unbridled scope for large-scale corruption.”
This report is based on interviews with victims of abuses and their
families from Assam, Delhi, and the state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as
legal experts, academics, activists, and police officials. It examines
the discriminatory nature of the Citizenship Amendment Act and how the
law, when combined with government citizenship verification initiatives
including the National Population Register and National Register of
Citizens, places millions of Muslims and other minorities at risk of
statelessness and disenfranchisement. It documents allegations of police
abuses against protesters. It also details discriminatory and
error-prone practices against Bengali-speaking inhabitants in the
process of updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the
arbitrary and biased functioning of Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals,
heightening concerns about any planned nationwide process.
An Inherently Discriminatory Law
The citizenship law amendments passed by parliament in December 2019
will allow Hindus and other non-Muslims who were unable to prove their
citizenship status in Assam – and thus were left out of the National
Register of Citizens – to maintain their Indian citizenship. It will
also apply to other religious minorities who might be left out in the
proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens. It will not, however,
protect Muslims left off the registry.
BJP leaders have publicly used the act to assure Hindus in other
parts of the country that they will be protected in the citizenship
verification process. “I want to assure all Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist,
and Christian refugees, that you will not be forced to leave India,”
Home Minister Amit Shah said in October 2019, conspicuously omitting
Muslims from the list of protected religions. “Don’t believe rumors.
Before NRC, we will bring [the] Citizenship Amendment Bill, which will
ensure these people get Indian citizenship.”
The citizenship law amendment is discriminatory and in violation of
international human rights law because it applies only to non-Muslims
from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The BJP government describes
them as “refugees” trying to escape persecution in their country of
origin while excluding Muslims from these predominantly Muslim
countries, treating them as “infiltrators.” Defending the bill in
parliament, Shah said, “There is a fundamental difference between a
refugee and an infiltrator. This bill is for refugees.”
The government has tried to justify the law, saying it seeks to
provide sanctuary to religious minorities abroad fleeing persecution.
However, that claim is belied by the exclusion of many other vulnerable
groups who have sought refuge in India, such as minority Tamils from Sri
Lanka and ethnic Nepalis from Bhutan. It also effectively excludes
other persecuted Muslim minorities like the Hazaras from Afghanistan,
the Shia and Ahmadiyya from Pakistan, and the Rohingya from Myanmar.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
called the law “fundamentally discriminatory.” In February 2020, UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was concerned about the
future of religious minorities in India after the enactment of the
citizenship amendment law, saying “there is a risk of statelessness.”
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom said the
US government “should consider sanctions against the home minister and
other principal leadership” and held a hearing in March 2020 in which
one of the commissioners raised concerns that the law “in conjunction
with a planned National Population Register and a potential nationwide
National Register of Citizens, or NRC, could result in the wide-scale
disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims.”
Linking the Citizenship Law, National Population Register, and National Register of Citizens
The National Population Register is a list of all people residing in
India, irrespective of their nationality. Indian officials will distill
those considered “doubtful” citizens based on the NPR, to create a final
list of those verified. This will be the National Register of Citizens.
Those not verified, if non-Muslim, can get citizenship under the
amended citizenship law which applies to irregular immigrants.
There have been contradictory statements by senior government
officials, including Modi and Shah, in which they have attempted to
delink the three. Shah said in December 2019 that, “There is no link
between the NRC and the NPR. The data collected for the NPR will not be
used in the NRC.” In March 2020, he told parliament the NPR process will
not ask for any documents and “nobody will be marked ‘doubtful.’ Nobody
needs to be scared of the process of the NPR in this country.”
Shah’s reassurances, however, carry little weight in the face of past
government statements and recent legal provisions. BJP officials have
repeatedly indicated that data from the NPR will provide essential
inputs when the government compiles the NRC, its list of verified
citizens. Soon after the Modi government won its first term, in July
2014, Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju told parliament,
“it has been decided that NPR should be completed and taken to its
logical conclusion, which is the creation of NRIC [National Register of
Indian Citizens] by verification of citizenship status of every usual
residents in the NPR.” The BJP’s manifesto for the 2019 national
elections also promised to conduct a nationwide NRC.
India has, over the decades, witnessed large numbers of migrants,
particularly Bangladeshi Muslims. Successive governments have adopted
measures in response, particularly to contain irregular economic
migration. Under the Citizenship Act, 1955, a person gained Indian
citizenship by birth, descent, registration, naturalization, or formal
government incorporation of the territory in which they lived. Irregular
immigrants, who entered the country without valid travel documents or
overstayed beyond the permitted period, could be imprisoned or deported
under the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Passport (Entry into India) Act,
1920.
In 2003, the Citizenship Act was first amended to introduce the term
“illegal migrant.” The government also adopted the Citizenship
(Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules,
2003, which introduced the National Population Register and explained
that the National Register of Indian Citizens will contain details of
persons after “due verification made from the Population Register.”
The NPR process, which began in 2010 and was updated again in 2015,
was not, however, used for a citizenship verification process. Nor did
the process include details that have been sought by the Modi
government, which on July 31, 2019, issued a notification to update the
NPR throughout the country in 2020. According to the Modi government,
the objective of the NPR is to create a comprehensive identity database
of every “usual resident” in the country, defined as a person who has
lived in an area for the preceding six months or has plans to live there
for six months in the future. The proposed database will contain
demographic as well as biometric information.
The National Population Register will form the basis for identifying
verified citizens and screen out so-called “illegal immigrants” or
“infiltrators.” However, the rules do not clarify the process or
criteria for verification, who will be considered “doubtful,” and how
they can establish their citizenship. Lack of clarity raises concerns of
arbitrariness and bias of local officials, much like the verification
process conducted in Assam. Nor is there clarity on various procedures,
document requirements, and the type of questions to be included in the
NPR. Officials have made contradictory statements that obfuscate facts
in the face of growing criticism.
Following protests in December 2019, opposition-led governments of
West Bengal and Kerala states suspended all work updating the National
Population Register. Several other state governments have said they will
not conduct a citizenship verification process. Over 140 petitions have
been filed in the Supreme Court contesting the constitutionality of the
amended citizenship law. In March 2020, the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights filed an intervention application as amicus curiae (third
party) in the Supreme Court, urging it to take into account
international human rights law, norms, and standards in the proceedings
related to the Citizenship Amendment Act. The Indian government
criticized the application saying the citizenship law was an “internal
matter” and “no foreign party has any locus standi [grounds to sue] on
issues pertaining to India’s sovereignty.”
State and Institutional Failures in Response to Protests
The violence in Delhi began soon after local BJP politician Kapil
Mishra, who had earlier led a large demonstration calling to “shoot” the
protesters, posted a video in which he gave an ultimatum to the police,
threatening to take the matter into his own hands if the police did not
clear the roads of protesters in three days. First there were clashes
between Hindus who supported the government and Muslims protesting
against the new citizenship law, but this soon transformed into Hindu
mobs chanting nationalist slogans, armed with swords, sticks, metal
pipes, and bottles filled with petrol, rampaging through several
neighborhoods in northeast Delhi, killing Muslims and burning their
homes, shops, mosques, and property.
While several Hindus were also killed, including a policeman and a
government official, Muslims overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the
brutality. The police not only failed to stop mob attacks by BJP
supporters, some witnesses alleged that the police assisted mob attacks.
In parliament, Shah, who is in charge of the Delhi police, praised them
for “effectively containing the riot within 36 hours.”
Prior to the violence in Delhi, at least 30 people were killed, and
hundreds arrested for protesting the new citizenship law and citizenship
verification process, all in BJP-governed states: 23 in Uttar Pradesh, 5
in Assam, and 2 in Karnataka. Most of those killed were Muslims,
including an 8-year-old boy in Uttar Pradesh who reportedly died in a
stampede as protesters fled a police crackdown. Several policemen were
injured.
The authorities also used a colonial-era law against public
gatherings, as well as internet shutdowns and limits on public
transportation, to prevent peaceful anti-citizenship law protests. The
police arbitrarily arrested those critical of the government and accused
several people under India’s draconian sedition laws. Several activists
and protesters said that they were beaten in custody. A fact-finding
report by Indian rights groups found that children were also detained
and beaten in police custody. Police in Uttar Pradesh state raided
Muslim neighborhoods and ransacked shops and residences, instilling fear
among the community.
Police allegedly acted in a partisan manner, using excessive force
against demonstrators protesting the law, but failing to intervene
during violent attacks by government supporters. On January 30, 2020,
the police did not take action when a government supporter shot at
students protesting outside the Jamia Millia Islamia University in
Delhi.Yet a few weeks prior,
on December 15, the police had used teargas to disperse protesters at
the same university, even entering the library and hostels, beating
students and some staff. A video of police brutally beating a man as
female students tried to protect him led to criticism over excessive
police actions.
Jamia Millia Islamia University has a large number of Muslim
students. The partisan police actions at the university have been
accompanied by bigoted statements by BJP leaders, including the prime
minister, who suggested that protesters could be “identified by their
clothes,” implying only Muslims were protesting the new law. Another BJP
leader described some protesters as “rabidly indoctrinated Islamists,”
an assertion that can lead to arbitrary arrests and terrorism
allegations.
Several BJP leaders made divisive, hate-filled remarks against the
people protesting at Shaheen Bagh that may have incited violent attacks
on protesters. One BJP lawmaker warned that those protesting in Shaheen
Bagh “will enter your homes, they will pick up your sisters and
daughters and rape and kill them.”
The Delhi High Court, while hearing petitions about the riots in the
city in February, questioned the Delhi police decision to not file cases
against BJP leaders advocating violence, saying it sent the wrong
message and perpetuated impunity. Instead of responding to court orders,
the government fast-tracked orders transferring the presiding judge to
another state, taking the riot-related cases away from him. Critics said
they found the timing “disturbing.” Under a new judge, the court
accepted the submission of the government’s attorney that the situation
was not immediately “conducive” for registering police complaints.
When activist Harsh Mander, petitioner in the high court case against
BJP leaders, filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court
against this order, the solicitor-general, arguing on behalf of the
government, accused Mander, instead, of inciting violence and being
contemptuous of the Supreme Court in a previous speech – a clear act of
reprisal.
Lessons from Assam
On August 31, 2019, the final National Register of Citizens in Assam
was published, leaving out the names of over 1.9 million people,
including many who have lived in India for years, in some cases their
entire lifetime. Over 33 million people had submitted applications to
enroll their names. Said Mohsin Alam Bhat, executive director of the
Centre for Public Interest Law at Jindal Global Law School:
This is the single largest legal event in scale of affected
population since the partition and resettlement of refugees. It is not
just 1.9 million people but also their families. Considering that the
government may introduce [a citizenship verification project] in other
places, in terms of a cascading effect, this is absolutely
unprecedented.
Human Rights Watch found the NRC process in Assam lacked
standardization, leading to arbitrary and discriminatory decisions by
officials. The NRC also applied more stringent verification standards
regarding documentation to members of ethnic Bengali minority groups who
were suspected to be “non-original” inhabitants. The process failed to
take into account that poorer residents, often surviving on basic
subsistence, do not have access to identity documentation – dating back
for decades – to establish citizenship claims. Many also lost
documentation during internal migration in Assam as they moved for
livelihood, marriage or other personal factors, violence, or because
they were displaced – a common occurrence in flood-prone Assam state.
Women in India are more likely than men to lack access to
documentation and as a result were disproportionately affected,
especially those from poor and marginalized communities. Many women do
not have birth certificates and have never attended school. Child
marriage rates are high in Assam, as they are in most of India, and
about 40 percent of girls in Assam were married before they were allowed
to vote at age 18. This means that their first official documents are
often voter identification cards that carry their married names, making
it impossible to prove their link to their parents. Any nationwide
citizenship verification process is likely to hurt them similarly.
The process has been so fraught that a nongovernmental organization,
Citizens for Justice and Peace, said that 56 people have died in Assam
since 2015 over fears related to their citizenship status. Several are
said to have committed suicide at least in part because of fear of being
declared irregular foreigners or fear of detention, and some died in
detention centers due to alleged negligence of authorities.
State-provided identity documents are also prone to errors. Human
Rights Watch found that even people with legitimate documents proving
their citizenship status were not registered because of technical
reasons such as spelling mistakes or different names being used in the
various documents.
Aslam (name changed), a Bengali Muslim who worked as a driver in
Guwahati, was excluded from the NRC even though his parents, wife, and
children were included. He was likely excluded, he said, because the
spelling of his name on his voter identification card and his income tax
identification card known as Permanent Account Number (PAN) are
different. “The form for the PAN card is in English, but we fill the
forms for voter identity card in Assamese,” he said. “Then when they
change it into English, the spelling of the name often changes.”
Human Rights Watch also found that the Foreigners Tribunals, which
decide the question of citizenship, lack transparency and fail to follow
uniform procedures, often making their decisions inconsistent. Members
lack independence and are vulnerable to pressure from the authorities
because the government’s evaluation of their performance is often
measured by the number of people they declare as irregular immigrants. A
former member of a Foreigners Tribunal told Human Rights Watch:
I admit that there might be arbitrary actions by Foreigners
Tribunals because there is an internal government policy that more and
more people should be deemed foreigners. We are hired on the basis of
contracts – those with records of declaring more and more people as
foreigners are preferred.
Activists and journalists said that significantly more Muslims were
being tried and a much greater proportion were declared foreigners as
compared to Hindus, likely because of political pressure.
In the regular justice system, once a matter is decided in a lower
court it can only be challenged in a higher court, but a person cleared
by a tribunal can be tried multiple times for being a suspected
irregular immigrant. There are numerous cases in which people who have
been declared citizens are presented with fresh notices to appear before
the tribunals.
Once a person is declared an irregular immigrant by the tribunals,
they can be detained by the police. Currently, there are six-makeshift
detention centers in prisons across Assam. According to official data,
988 people were detained in these centers as of November 2019. The
government has said it will build 10 detention centers in the state for
those who are declared irregular foreigners. In January 2019, the Modi
government sent a “Model Detention Manual” to all states that called for
the setting up of “one detention camp in the city or district where [a]
major immigration check post is located,” and that said “all members
[of a family] should be housed in the same detention centre.”
However, Prime Minister Modi, while speaking at a rally on December
22, at a time when he should have known the claims were false, said his
government had never discussed a national register of citizens and
denied that that there were any detention centers for irregular
immigrants in the country.
International Legal Standards
The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act violates India’s international
obligations to prevent deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race,
color, descent, or national or ethnic origin as found in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other human
rights treaties that India has ratified. The 1992 Declaration on the
Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and
Linguistic Minorities calls on governments to protect the existence and
identity of religious minorities within their territories and to adopt
the appropriate measures to achieve this end. Governments are obligated
to ensure that people belonging to minority groups, including religious
minorities, may exercise their human rights without discrimination and
in full equality before the law. Governments also have an obligation to
ensure gender equality. To the extent that the process has a
disproportionately harmful impact on the citizenship rights of women and
girls, it also violates the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women.
Key Recommendations
The citizenship law and verification process are contrary to the
basic principles of secularism and equality enshrined in the Indian
constitution and in domestic law. Indian authorities should immediately
reverse course and adopt rights-respecting laws and policies regarding
citizenship. They should also uphold the rights to freedom of expression
and to peaceful assembly.
The Indian government should:
Repeal the Citizenship Amendment
Act, 2019, and ensure that any future national asylum and refugee policy
does not discriminate on any grounds, including religion, and is
compliant with international legal standards.
Discard any plan for a
nationwide citizenship verification project until there are public
consultations to establish standardized procedures and due process
protections ensuring the process is not discriminatory and does not
impose undue hardship on the poor, minority communities, and women.
Protect the rights to freedom of
expression and assembly of those protesting against the government’s
citizenship law and policies.
Ensure prompt, credible, and
impartial investigations into the killings of protesters, allegations of
use of excessive force by police, arbitrary detention, and raids on
Muslims homes and property.
Release all those arbitrarily
detained for protesting against the citizenship law and dismiss
politically motivated charges against protesters and civil society
activists.
Investigate hate speech by government officials and appropriately prosecute incitement to violence.
Muslims Face Discriminatory Policies; Protesters Targeted
Methodology
This report is based on Human Rights Watch field research and
interviews conducted in India’s Assam state in September 2019, and in
Delhi and Uttar Pradesh state between December 2019 and February 2020.
We spoke with victims of abuses and their families, witnesses, legal
experts, academics, activists, and police officials.
The report also draws upon secondary literature, including research
conducted by other rights groups, media reports, government statistics,
parliament proceedings, and rulings by the Supreme Court and High
Courts.
Human Rights Watch interviewed about 50 people in Meerut,
Muzaffarnagar, and Bijnor districts in Uttar Pradesh. In Assam, we
interviewed more than 50 people who had either been excluded from the
National Register of Citizens or had previously contested their
citizenship in a Foreigners Tribunal. In addition, we spoke with lawyers
and activists representing families of victims, experts, and
journalists who have reported on these issues. Interviews were conducted
in Bongaigaon, Barpeta, Baksa, and Goalpara districts and the city of
Guwahati in Assam.
Human Rights Watch, with the consent of the victims or their
families, received and has retained copies of police reports,
citizenship documents, court documents, and other relevant documents.
Interviews were conducted in Hindi or English. In Assam, most interviews
were conducted in Bengali or Assamese through an independent
interpreter.
Several people have used pseudonyms and, on their request,
identifying information has been withheld to protect their privacy and
safety. Human Rights Watch provided no remuneration or other inducement
to the interviewees.
I. Citizenship Law, Population Register, and the National Register of Citizens
Since the partition of 1947 and the creation of independent India and
Pakistan, followed by a series of wars between the two countries, there
have been several waves of refugees into India. India has also been
host to many refugees from Tibet, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan,
Myanmar, and elsewhere. There are also many irregular economic migrants.
Citizenship in India is governed by the Citizenship Act. The
government amended the Citizenship Act on December 12, 2019, to make,
for the first time, religion a basis for citizenship claims in India.
Contrary to India’s secular constitution, the Citizenship Amendment Act,
2019 (CAA) deliberately excludes Muslims and grants citizenship
to non-Muslim irregular immigrants from the neighboring Muslim-majority
countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who arrived in India
before December 31, 2014.[1]
Other claimants remain eligible to seek citizenship under the existing
law. The government asserted that it wanted to provide for persecuted
religious minorities from these three countries. “We are not taking away
anyone's citizenship,” said Prime Minister Modi. “It is an Act that
gives citizenship to persecuted people.”[2]
The amended law led to protests across India. Combined with the
government’s plan to update the National Population Register (NPR),
followed by a push for a nationwide citizenship verification process,
the National Register of Citizens (NRC), aimed at identifying “illegal
migrants,” the new law could strip millions of Indian Muslims of their
citizenship rights while protecting those of Hindus and other
non-Muslims. “I want to assure all Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and
Christian refugees, that you will not be forced to leave India,” Home
Minister Amit Shah promised in October 2019, conspicuously omitting
Muslims from the list of protected religions. “Don’t believe rumors.
Before NRC, we will bring [the] Citizenship Amendment Bill, which will
ensure these people get Indian citizenship.”[3]
There have been contradictory statements by various government
officials, including the prime minister and the home minister in which
they have attempted to delink the Citizenship Amendment Act, the
National Population Register, and the National Register of Citizens.[4]
The prime minister has also said that there are no plans for a National
Register of Citizens even as the home minister has repeatedly said
otherwise in public speeches, interviews, and even in parliament in
November 2019.[5]
Similarly, in statements on procedures, requirements for documents, and
types of question in the National Population Register, senior officials
have contradicted official documents, obfuscating facts or deviating
from prior expressions of the government’s intentions in the face of
growing criticism.
In March 2020, faced with the challenge of combating the COVID-19
global pandemic, the central government postponed the process to update
the National Population Register.[6]
Citizenship under Indian Law
The Citizenship Act, 1955 allows for citizenship of India by birth,
descent, registration, naturalization, or incorporation of territory.[7]
Irregular immigrants, who entered the country without valid travel
documents or overstayed beyond the permitted period, could be imprisoned
or deported under the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Passport (Entry into
India) Act, 1920.
In 2003, the Citizenship Act was first amended by an earlier BJP
government to introduce the term “illegal migrant” and a National
Register of Citizens.[8]
Section 14A of the law inserted a new provision calling for the
establishment of a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) and
national identity cards.[9]
New Citizenship Law Discriminates Against Muslims
In December 2019, the parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment)
Bill, which amended the Citizenship Act to make irregular immigrants
from Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, and Zoroastrian communities from
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan eligible for citizenship, but
excluded Muslims. The law also lowered the minimum years of residence
required for naturalization in India from 11 years to 5 years for these
groups. In effect, the government is making a distinction between
Muslims, whom it contends have immigrated illegally and are thus
“infiltrators,” and non-Muslims, who are treated as “refugees” who have
escaped persecution in the three countries. “There is a fundamental
difference between a refugee and an infiltrator,” Shah said when
defending the bill in parliament. “This bill is for refugees.”[10]
The BJP has used this narrative to demonize Muslims and win Hindu
votes in elections. “Illegal immigrants are like termites and they are
eating the food that should go to our poor and they are taking our
jobs,” Shah said at an election rally in Delhi in September 2018. “They
carry out blasts [bombings] in our country and so many of our people
die.” Shah promised that “if we come to power in 2019, we will find each
and every one and send them away. Action against them should not worry
any patriot.”[11]
In January 2019, several opposition lawmakers, part of the joint
parliamentary committee that reviewed the bill, concluded that it
violates articles 14 and 15 of the Indian constitution, which guarantee
the right to equality and nondiscrimination.[12]
During the parliamentary debate on December 9, 2019, several opposition
leaders opposed the bill as an assault on the foundational values of
the country. “[T]his is merely a cynical political exercise to further
single out and disenfranchise an entire community in India and in doing
so, a betrayal of all that was good and noble about our civilization,”
said Shashi Tharoor, of the Indian National Congress party.[13]
The government sought to justify the law by asserting that it seeks
to provide sanctuary to religious minorities fleeing persecution in
neighboring countries.[14]
However, that claim collapses as a general principle of protection for
members of religious minorities because the law excludes many minority
groups that have sought refuge in India, including Tamils from Sri
Lanka, Hazaras from Afghanistan, Shia and Ahmadiyya from Pakistan, and
Chin and Rohingya minorities from Myanmar.[15]
Over 140 petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court challenging
the constitutionality of the law, including a petition by the state of
Kerala.[16] Some argued that the Citizenship Amendment Act violated articles 14, 15, 21, and 25 of the Indian constitution.[17]
Article 14 guarantees equality before law and equal protection of the
laws to all persons living in India; article 15 prohibits discrimination
on specific grounds, including religion; article 21 guarantees right to
life and personal liberty; and article 25 protects right to freedom of
religion.[18]
In March 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
filed an intervention application as amicus curiae (third party) in the
Supreme Court in a petition filed by three retired public officials,
urging it to take into account international human rights law, norms,
and standards in the proceedings related to the Citizenship Amendment
Act.[19]
The Indian government criticized the move saying the CAA was an
“internal matter” and “no foreign party has any locus standi [grounds to
sue] on issues pertaining to India’s sovereignty.”[20]
National Population Register and National Register of Indian Citizens
In 2003, the government adopted the Citizenship (Registration of
Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules (the “2003
Citizenship Rules”), which introduced the National Population Register
and explained the National Register of Indian Citizens.[21]
The objective of the NPR was to create a comprehensive identity
database of every “usual resident” in the country, defined as a person
living in an area for past six months or with plans to live there for
six months in the future.[22]
The 2003 Citizenship Rules also specify that data from the National
Population Register will provide inputs essential to creation of a
National Register of Citizens. The NPR is a list of all people residing
in India, irrespective of their nationality, while the NRC is a list of
citizens that will be prepared from the NPR after verification.[23]
The NPR is also different from the census, which is conducted every 10
years and is due in 2021. The census data also has information about all
residents of India but does not list their names.
The Local Registrar, a government functionary, will verify the
details in the NPR, cull cases of doubtful citizenship, conduct further
inquiries to verify suspicious citizenship status, and then prepare a
draft Local Register of Indian Citizens, which will exclude those not
able to establish their claim of citizenship.[24]
However, the 2003 Citizenship Rules do not clarify the process or
criteria for verification, who will be considered “doubtful,” and how
they can establish their citizenship. Lack of clarity raises concerns
that the process will be marred by arbitrariness and bias from local
officials, as has happened with the verification process in Assam – the
first state to hold the NRC – in which nearly two million people were
left off the list.[25]
More than 100 former civil servants – retired bureaucrats, police
officials, and Indian diplomats – wrote an open letter, explaining the
link between the CAA, NPR, and NRC, saying these policies were
“unnecessary and wasteful,” and raising serious concerns they would be
prone to bias, arbitrariness, errors, and targeting of specific
communities:
Earlier, on July 31, 2019, the BJP government had issued a
notification to update the NPR again throughout the country between
April 1, 2020 and September 30, 2020, except in the state of Assam where
a separate National Register of Citizens was published in August 2019.[27]
Government-appointed enumerators will visit each household to collect
demographic and biometric data from its members. The NPR could then be
used to produce a list of verified citizens for the NRC.
After widespread protests, the opposition-run governments of West
Bengal and Kerala states suspended all work on updating the NPR.[28] Several other state governments have said they will not comply with the citizenship verification process.
Contrary and Vague Government Statements
In response to protests, Home Minister Shah said, “There is no link
between the NRC and the NPR. The data collected for the NPR will not be
used in the NRC.”[29]
In March 2020, he told parliament that the NPR process will not ask for
any documents and “nobody will be marked ‘doubtful.’ Nobody needs to be
scared of the process of the NPR in this country.”[30]
Shah’s comment was not reassuring because it contradicted previous statements.[31]
“I assure you NRC will be implemented across the country and all
infiltrators identified and expelled before 2024 polls,” Shah said in
December 2019.[32] The BJP’s manifesto for the 2019 national elections had promised a nationwide NRC.[33]
Rule 4 of the 2003 Citizenship Rules states that if a National
Population Register is created, the data collected can be used to
generate a National Register of Citizens and identify “illegal
immigrants.”[34] With the census also being conducted in 2020, the NPR has little meaning except for creating the NRC.[35]
In July 2014, the Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju told
parliament that the government will use the NPR for “verification of
citizenship status.”[36] He and others in government have since repeated this several times.[37]
The information and broadcasting minister in December 2019 said the
cabinet had decided that, “No documents or biometrics will be collected
during the NPR process. Whatever people will say will be accepted.”[38]
However, the 2018-19 annual report of the Ministry of Home Affairs said
the NPR already included biometric data of 334.3 million (33.43 crore)
people.[39]
In 2015, the BJP government inserted individuals’ unique Aadhaar number into the NPR database.[40]
Aadhaar, which collects personal and biometric data such as
fingerprints, facial photographs, and iris scans, is a 12-digit
individualized identity number that has been vulnerable to data breaches
and leaks and has raised serious concerns over privacy and
surveillance.[41] A government document published by the news website Wire
stated that 600 million Aadhaar numbers – about half the total – are
already inserted within the NPR database and officials plan to collect
the remainder during the NPR updating process.[42]
Apar Gupta, executive director of Internet Freedom Foundation,
expressed concerns that this would increase risks of mass surveillance:
Aadhaar enables profiling where a unique identifier is used
across different government databases for access to entitlements and
essential services. Therefore, if it is also linked to the citizenship
register, it will increase the powers of the government to enable mass
surveillance in which it would have a complete 360-degree view of all
Indians. The very basis of a citizenship register provides a legal
identity for existence which in case of dispute, can then be also
utilized to disable other supporting services provided by the
government.[43]
The government has vacillated about the NPR requirements. The 2003
Citizenship Rules provide that 12 basic pieces of information be
collected.[44] However, according to the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, the NPR requires 15 pieces of information.[45]
The 2020 instruction manual for enumerators and supervisors for the NPR
update exercise reveals that it will require yet more information
including where and when a person’s parents were born. It will also seek
an individual’s Aadhaar number, driver’s license number, voter identity
card number, passport number, and mobile phone number.[46] The government has since said that providing information on parents’ place and date of birth will not be mandatory.[47]
The Assam Experience
In August 2019, India’s northeastern state of Assam was the first
state to complete its own NRC. The project, an update to the NRC first
held in the state in 1951, following repeated protests and violence by
Assamese groups over irregular migration from Bangladesh, left out
nearly two million people.[48] Assam’s NRC process cost the central government 12 billion rupees (US$171 million).[49]
Most of those excluded are ethnic Bengali, many of them Muslim. Those
left out of the NRC will have to prove their citizenship at Foreigners
Tribunals, quasi-judicial courts in Assam adjudicating citizenship
cases.[50]
In May 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs amended the 1964 Foreigners
(Tribunal) Order to allow tribunals to be set up across the country.[51]
This, combined with the home minister’s statements that he will drive
out all “illegal immigrants” before the 2024 elections, has triggered
concerns that the government is gearing up for a nationwide NRC.
While the Assam NRC required every resident of the state to submit an
application, nationwide citizenship verification will be based on the
NPR, which will be compiled based on data collected by enumerators who
visit every home.
The process of updating the 1951 NRC in Assam started in 2015 and the
final list was published in August 2019. The process was marred by
errors and bias.[52]
It also made unreasonable demands upon millions of people in Assam,
often people surviving on basic subsistence, who have no access to
historical documentation to establish citizenship claims. To prove their
citizenship, individuals were expected to provide documentary evidence
dating back over 50 years, which was particularly difficult for the most
marginalized people, particularly those who had been repeatedly
internally displaced because of frequent natural disasters such as
floods, as well as outbreaks of violence. A group of retired
bureaucrats, diplomats, and police officials, in an open letter, have
pointed to the shortcomings in Assam to warn against what could happen
when the NPR and NRC are carried out in rest of the country:
The Assam NRC exercise has thrown up the dangers of such a
large-scale exercise: lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of citizens have
been made to spend their life’s savings running from pillar to post to
establish their citizenship credentials. Worrying reports are already
coming in of people in different parts of India rushing in panic to
obtain the necessary birth documents. The problem is magnified in a
country where the maintenance of birth records is poor, coupled with
highly inefficient birth registration systems. Errors of inclusion and
exclusion have been a feature of all large-scale surveys in India.[53]
Official national data shows that the poor and marginalized will be
placed at further risk by any process that demands birth and
legacy-related documents to prove citizenship. According to the
government’s 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS), which
includes responses from half a million people, only 80 percent of
children under the age of 5 had their births registered while just 62
percent had birth certificates. Only 60 percent of Muslims and Dalits,
and 56 percent of Adivasis had the document.[54]
Targeting Muslims
In Assam, ethnic Assamese had sought to deny citizenship to ethnic
Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim. The ruling BJP, however, focused
primarily on Bengali Muslims, asserting without evidence that many
Muslims were wrongly included in the list and viewing the large numbers
of excluded Hindus as a major setback. “We can never accept this NRC
where names of illegal Bangladeshi Muslims have appeared,” said BJP
legislator Dilip Kumar Paul. “Our BJP's stand is that Hindus can never
be foreigners.”[55]
The BJP has indicated that it considers the new citizenship law as
the solution for Bengali-speaking Hindus left out of the NRC in Assam.[56]
It would also resolve similar challenges in a nationwide exercise.
Non-Muslims who are considered doubtful citizens or illegal immigrants
because of inadequate documentation will have an opportunity to get
citizenship under the CAA, but Muslims with similarly inadequate
documentation, will be at risk of statelessness and arbitrary detention.
As of November 2019, 988 people declared irregular immigrants in Assam were detained in makeshift detention centers.[57]
The Assam government has said it will build 10 detention centers for
those declared foreigners, and is building the first one in Goalpara
district that can accommodate up to 3,000 detainees.[58] Karnataka state has also built a detention center.[59]
In January 2019, the Modi government sent a “Model Detention Manual” to
all states that called for the setting up of “one detention camp in the
city or district where [a] major immigration check post is located.”[60]
In July, the Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed to parliament that
instructions were issued to all state governments for detention centers
“to restrict the movements of illegally staying foreign nationals so
that they are physically available at all times for expeditious
repatriation/deportation.”[61]
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Modi denied that any detention centers for irregular immigrants were being set up.[62]
Women Disproportionately Affected
Women in India often lack access to documentation. Many, especially
from poor and marginalized communities, do not have birth certificates
and have never attended school. About 27 percent of girls in India marry
as children, before age 18.[63]
This means that their first official documents are often voter
identification cards that carry their married names and new address,
making it difficult to prove their link to their parents as required
under the NRC.[64]
Any nationwide citizenship verification process is similarly likely
to hurt them. Stated a fact-finding report on Assam’s NRC by Women
Against Sexual Violence and State Repression, a countrywide group of
women activists:
In a patriarchal society, women in general, and women from
marginal and oppressed communities in particular, have historically and
traditionally been excluded from entitlements to land and access to
education and have almost no documentation to prove their existence as
citizens.[65]
Because of these barriers, women are particularly likely to rely on a residency certificate issued by a gram panchayat, an elected village council, to prove their status.[66]
When an Assam court in 2017 ruled that the gram panchayat certificate
was ineligible as a linkage document, it was a considerable setback for
millions of married women who used it to establish their connection to
their parents.[67] In December 2017, the Supreme Court modified the rule, allowing the use of the document, subject to verification of its authenticity.[68]
It imposed a two-step verification process that disproportionately
impacted “non-original” women residents, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims
and Hindu minorities.[69]
Jannat (name changed), 29, was born in Barpeta district and is
married to an electrician in Guwahati. Her parents and all her siblings’
names are included in the NRC, but she was excluded. Her husband and
son are included.[70]
The authorities did not give any reason for Jannat’s exclusion. Nor did
they ask for any additional documentation during verification. But
Jannat and her husband believe it is because authorities did not accept
the certificate from the gram panchayat establishing her relationship with her paternal family.[71]
They are worried about the additional time and resources they will have
to spend in appealing to the Foreigners Tribunal. Jannat’s husband told
Human Rights Watch:
We will have appeal in a tribunal in Barpeta. My son goes to
school here, my business is here. Twice earlier, when we had to go, we
had to hire a car and it cost us about 2000 rupees each ($28). We will
have to run around again for foreigner tribunals. It’s a big hardship.[72]
Another woman, Rachana (name changed), said that while trying to
prove her citizenship at the Foreigners Tribunal she provided numerous
documents as legacy data, but to show a link to her parents, her primary
document was a certificate from the gram panchayat. However, the tribunal said that she could not prove link to her father.[73]
Rachana says her family has already spent money beyond their means in
legal and document fees and travel to courts. “We sold two cows, chicken
and goats. Now we do not have anything to sell,” she said.[74]
Global Response and International Legal Standards
The CAA drew international condemnation and prompted protests around
the world. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
called the law “fundamentally discriminatory.”[75]
In February 2020, the UN secretary-general said he was concerned over
the future of religious minorities in India after the enactment of the
CAA, saying “there is a risk of statelessness.”[76]
In January 2020, the United States Congress held a hearing on global
religious persecution and raised concerns over the citizenship law and
citizenship verification processes.[77]
The same month, the European Parliament debated a joint motion on the
law that described it as “discriminatory in nature and dangerously
divisive.”[78]
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said the US
government “should consider sanctions against the home minister and
other principal leadership” and held a hearing in March during which one
commissioner raised concerns that the law “in conjunction with a
planned National Population Register and a potential nation-wide
National Register of Citizens, or NRC, could result in the wide-scale
disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims.”[79]
International human rights law obligates governments to ensure that
people belonging to minority groups, including religious minorities, may
exercise their human rights without discrimination and in full equality
before the law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “[e]veryone has the right to a nationality” and that “[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.”[80]
The CAA violates India’s international obligations to prevent
deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, color, descent, or
national or ethnic origin, as found in the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and other human rights treaties that
India has ratified.[81]
The UN Human Rights Committee, the international expert body that
interprets the ICCPR, noted in a general comment, that “Aliens receive
the benefit of the general requirement of non-discrimination in respect
of the rights guaranteed in the Covenant.”[82]
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated in a
general recommendation that governments should “[e]nsure that particular
groups of non-citizens are not discriminated against with regard to
access to citizenship or naturalization.”[83]
The 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or
Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities calls on governments to
protect the existence and identity of religious minorities.[84]
Discriminatory or other provisions of the NRC that do not provide
equality before the law, disenfranchising or otherwise depriving people
of their rights, violates the ICCPR and other human rights treaties.[85]
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) prohibits government acts or practices, including
nationality laws, that have “the effect or purpose of impairing or
nullifying” women’s rights on a basis of equality with men.[86]
The Convention of the Rights of the Child provides that every child
should be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right to
acquire a nationality.[87]
While international law grants a state the authority to determine the
acquisition of its citizenship, this discretion may not be arbitrary.
States are prohibited from acting in a discriminatory or arbitrary
manner that would leave a person stateless. In making citizenship
determinations, states should take into account strong personal or
family ties that the individual has to the territory.[88] The UN special rapporteur on minority issues, in his November 2018 report to the General Assembly, recommended that:
State requirements for the granting of citizenship,
including in relation to any preference in terms of linguistic,
religious or ethnic characteristics, must be reasonable and justified in
order not to constitute a form of discrimination prohibited under
international law.[89]
Several UN human rights experts sent letters to the Indian government
between June 2018 and May 2019 raising concerns over the discriminatory
Assam nationality registration process.[90]
In August 2019, the Indian government replied, claiming without basis
that the process was “comprehensive, fair, objective and inclusive with
multiple levels of remedies available for redressal of grievances and
consideration of claim of an applicant.”[91]
Under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination, states should take measures to combat prejudices
that lead to racial discrimination and promote understanding,
tolerance, and friendship among groups.[92]
Government should counter xenophobic behavior towards non-citizens, in
particular anti-immigrant hate speech and violence, and promote a better
understanding of the principle of non-discrimination in respect of the
situation of non-citizens.[93]
II. Abuses Against Protesters
After months of largely peaceful protests against the citizenship law
across the country, violence broke out in Delhi on February 24, 2020,
leaving at least 53 people dead and 200 injured, most of them Muslim.
Tensions had been building for weeks with BJP leaders openly advocating
violence against the protesters, portraying anyone who spoke out against
the government as working against the country’s interests.[94]
There are serious allegations that for three days the police chose
not to intervene when Hindu mobs attacked Muslim communities and
businesses.[95] Mobile phone videos and images show policemen participating in the violence.[96] The police denied the allegations.[97]
Responding to criticism in parliament, Home Minister Shah, in charge of
the Delhi police, praised them for “effectively containing the riot
within 36 hours.”[98]
After the protests broke out in December 2019, authorities
particularly in BJP-governed states cracked down against protesters.
Prior to the violence in Delhi, at least 30 people were killed in what
independent civil society groups concluded were cases of police
excessive use of force.[99]
The authorities also failed to interfere with BJP leaders who incited
violence but detained activists organizing peaceful protests, accusing
them of promoting violence.
Violence in Delhi
After peaceful protesters in northeast Delhi occupied an area near a
subway station, local BJP politician Kapil Mishra posted a video with an
ultimatum to the police, tweeting “we won’t listen to you [police] if
the roads are not vacated” of the protesters in three days.[100] Mishra had earlier led a large demonstration in Delhi, chanting “shoot the traitors,” referring to citizenship law protesters.[101]
Soon after he issued his demand, BJP supporters gathered in the area.
There were initially clashes between Hindus and Muslims, but the
situation was soon aggravated as Hindu mobs, armed with swords, sticks,
metal pipes, and bottles filled with petrol, began chanting nationalist
slogans. They then rampaged through several neighborhoods in northeast
Delhi, killing Muslims and burning their homes, shops, mosques, and
property.[102] Some Hindus were also killed, including a policeman and a government official.[103]
Hindu mobs stopped men in the streets demanding to see their identity
cards. If anyone refused, they were forced to show whether or not they
were circumcised, as is common among Muslim men. Several journalists
were attacked and harassed, while some were asked to confirm their
religion.[104]
Available evidence indicates that the police often did not intervene
to stop the Hindu mobs and in some cases, encouraged them or took part
in beating up Muslims.[105] Witness accounts and video evidence show police complicity in the attacks.[106]
In one incident, police officers were seen on video beating a group of
five Muslim men who had been injured during a mob attack in Delhi,
taunting them, and ordering them to sing the national anthem as a form
of humiliation. One of these men, 23-year old Faizan, later died.[107]
Inaction Against BJP Leaders Advocating Violence
Ahead of the Delhi legislative assembly elections on February 8,
2020, several BJP leaders made divisive, hate-filled remarks against the
people protesting at Shaheen Bagh. The protest at Shaheen Bagh, an
around-the-clock sit-in and peaceful protest led by Muslim women, began
on December 15, 2019, inspiring similar protests across the country.
Mishra called Shaheen Bagh “mini-Pakistan,” saying “Pakistani hooligans
have captured the streets of Delhi.”[108]
Anurag Thakur, a junior minister in the national BJP government, during
an election rally in the capital on January 27, led his supporters to
chant the slogan “shoot the traitors.”[109]
BJP lawmaker from Delhi Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma warned that those
protesting in Shaheen Bagh “will enter your homes, they will pick up
your sisters and daughters and rape and kill them.”[110] The slogan “shoot the traitors” has since been picked up in pro-BJP demonstrations.[111]
The Delhi High Court, while hearing petitions about the violence,
questioned the Delhi police decision to not file cases against BJP
leaders advocating violence, saying it sent the wrong message and
perpetuated impunity. Presiding Judge S. Muralidhar said, “This is the
anguish of a constitutional court. Why are you not showing alacrity when
it comes to registration of FIR [First Information Reports] in these
cases? We want peace to prevail.”[112]
Instead of responding to court orders, the government fast-tracked
orders to transfer Judge Muralidhar to another state, taking
riot-related cases away from him.[113]
Under a new judge, the court accepted the submission of the
government’s attorney that the situation was not “conducive” for
registering police complaints, and granted the BJP government three
weeks to file a counter affidavit.[114]
When activist Harsh Mander, petitioner in the high court case against
BJP leaders, filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court against
this order, the BJP government – in evident reprisal – accused him of
inciting violence and being contemptuous of the Supreme Court in a
previous speech.[115]
Mander said the Supreme Court had refused to hear his full speech on
two separate occasions, but, instead, relied on the solicitor general’s
version of it, which was edited.[116]
The Delhi police promptly filed an affidavit in court seeking his
dismissal from the case and to begin proceedings against him for
contempt. The Supreme Court asked Mander to file a response by April 15.[117]
In March, a group of nearly 100 retired bureaucrats wrote an open
letter in support of Mander, alleging that the solicitor general was
misleading the Supreme Court.[118]
Abusive Police Responses to Student Protests
Since December, the authorities have used a colonial-era law against
public gatherings, shutdowns of the internet, and limits on public
transportation to prevent peaceful protests against the CAA.[119]
They did not seek to interfere with mobs attacking anti-CAA
demonstrators. Evidence from some protests, including video evidence,
suggests that police used excessive force against demonstrators,
including many students. On numerous occasions, the police arbitrarily
arrested peaceful critics of the government and some were accused of
crimes such as sedition.
In Bidar district in Karnataka state, authorities filed sedition
charges against a head teacher and a parent at a private primary school
for a play critical of the CAA.[120]
The police questioned students, most of them Muslim, between 9-12 years
old for five consecutive days to get them to identify teachers or
parents who may have helped to develop the play.[121] Although a court later dismissed the allegations, by then the head teacher and the parent had spent two weeks in jail.[122]
The BJP lawmaker from the district called for the school’s status to be
revoked saying, “If this school is not shut down, then there is no
doubt that it will threaten the sovereignty of this country.”[123]
In contrast, on January 30, 2020, police, deployed to contain the
anti-CAA protests in Delhi, did not intervene when a gun-wielding
government supporter first threatened protesters, and then opened fire,
injuring a student.[124]
The police also failed to act when violent government supporters
attacked students on campus in Delhi, whether at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) on January 5, 2020, or on February 6, 2020 at Gargi
college.[125]
On December 15, police in Delhi used teargas to disperse protesting
students at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University (“Jamia
University”).[126]
The university’s vice chancellor said the police entered the campus
without permission and targeted students in the university library and
hostels, beating up students and some staff.[127] A video of police beating a man as female students try to defend him also raised concerns over police abuse.[128]
The police said, “Our only interest is to push the mob [protesting
students] back, so law and order can be restored in the area,” asserting
they were forced to respond after students turned violent, throwing
stones and damaging public vehicles.[129]
The university’s vice chancellor sought a high-level inquiry. The
students dissociated themselves from the violence in
a statement, saying: “We have maintained calm even when students have
been lathi-charged [attacked with long batons] and women protesters have been badly beaten up.”[130]
Nearly 60 people, including over 50 students, six police officials
and two firemen, were injured at the Jamia University protests.[131]
Hundreds gathered outside the city’s police headquarters in Delhi
seeking the release of detained students and demanding action against
Delhi police.[132] Many students across India came out in support of the Jamia University protesters.[133] In one incident, female protesters described being targeted by police violence in a sexualized manner.[134]
Police use of force against students at Jamia University and other
protesters contrasted starkly with police’s failure to intervene and
protect students at JNU on January 5, 2020, when alleged supporters of
the ruling BJP assaulted them.[135]
Students said they were attacked because they were opposing a
fee increase announced by the government and had protested the CAA.[136]
Dozens of masked men and several women carrying sticks, hammers, and
bricks and shouting pro-government Hindu nationalist slogans went on a
violent rampage inside the campus for about three hours, injuring more
than 30 students and teachers.[137]
The Delhi police filed a complaint of rioting and assault against
unidentified people. However, a video showed the police allowing the
attackers, many still carrying iron rods and sticks, to leave the campus
without trying to detain or question them.[138]
The police also stood by and failed to act as a mob chanting
nationalist slogans gathered at the campus gates and
beat journalists and a political activist.[139] A mob also attacked an ambulance attempting to enter the campus to attend to injured students.[140]
Several students told Human Rights Watch the attackers were members
of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a student group
affiliated with the BJP.[141]
A postgraduate research scholar at the university who was injured when
the assailants threw stones at students, said that she recognized some
attackers as ABVP members. “The police were present in the campus when
the violence broke out,” she said. “We sought help from them and then we
ran to flee the attackers, but the police never came to our aid.”[142]
Another graduate student who was injured said: “They threw something
made of iron at us and it hit me near my eye and it kept bleeding. I
recognized some of the attackers as JNU students from ABVP. Police were
supporting them. The campus security guards also did nothing.”[143]
A statement by the university’s teachers’ association condemned the
violence, saying it was unleashed “with the police standing by as mute
spectators.”[144]
The ABVP denied any role in the violence, saying 25 of its members
were injured in the attack, and blamed the assault on student groups
affiliated with leftist organizations.[145] The BJP condemned the violence, blaming opposition political parties.[146]
However, on January 7, an office-bearer of ABVP acknowledged on
national television that two of the people wielding sticks seen in
videos of the JNU attack were from ABVP. “I am not disowning they are
activists of ABVP…but it was all in self-defense,” she said.[147] As of mid-March, Delhi police had failed to make a single arrest for the attack on JNU.
Students led demonstrations in several parts of the country to
protest the violence against the JNU students. The Indian Medical
Association also condemned the “mindless violence on doctors and nurses
who rushed to treat the injured” at JNU.[148]
Misusing Laws to Prevent Protests
Since the protests began, authorities in several states have imposed
section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a colonial-era law that
prohibits a gathering of more than four people if there is fear of a
possible violation of law and order.[149]
The law is primarily meant to be applied in emergencies to maintain
“public tranquility,” but authorities have used it widely and frequently
to prevent protests, violating the right to peaceful assembly.[150] The law has been frequently used in the past in an overbroad and discriminatory manner.[151]
The Supreme Court has also said that the law “cannot be used to
suppress legitimate expression of opinion or grievance or exercise of
any democratic rights.”[152]
In February 2020, the High Court of Karnataka held that the imposition
of section 144 in Bangalore city for three days to prevent anti-CAA
protests had been unconstitutional because it did not meet the
parameters of “the least restrictive standard,” proportionality, and
existence of an “urgent situation.”[153]
The authorities also repeatedly shut down mobile internet services in several states as protests spread throughout the country.[154]
India has frequently used internet shutdowns in response to protests,
and, as Human Rights Watch and others have documented, these shutdowns
have largely been disproportionate, unnecessary, and in violation of
India’s international legal obligations including the rights to freedom
of expression and assembly.[155]
The shutdowns also affect access to essential activities and
services, including emergency services and health information, mobile
banking and e-commerce, transportation, school classes, reporting on
major crises and events, and human rights investigations. In December
2019, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued advisories,
warning television news broadcasters to “abstain from showing any
content that promotes anti-national attitudes.”[156]
III. Police Brutality in Uttar Pradesh
The BJP government and its supporters have targeted protesters for
arbitrary arrest and violence in states governed by the BJP. At least 30
people have been killed during protests, all in three BJP-governed
states: 23 in Uttar Pradesh, 5 in Assam, and 2 in Karnataka. The vast
majority of those killed and injured have been Muslims. Several police
officers have been injured.[157]
Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, the state with the largest number of
Muslims at nearly 40 million, has cracked down hardest on the protests.
In addition to the 23 deaths, dozens were injured, and hundreds of
people were arrested.[158]
The Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Ajay Singh Bisht, from the BJP, who
prefers to use a Hindu religious title, Yogi Adityanath, vowed to “take
revenge” against those protesting against the citizenship law and
verification process.[159]
Adityanath has previously been charged with inciting and leading
anti-Muslim violence as the founder of a Hindu youth militia, cases from
which the government withdrew after he became chief minister.[160] He has repeatedly made hateful, anti-Muslim remarks in public, and has endorsed extrajudicial violence by the police.[161] Nearly 80 people have been killed by police since he took office in March 2017.[162]
To prevent protests against the CAA, the state government imposed
section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code across the state from
December 2019 to February 2020, ordered internet shutdowns in various
districts, and preventively detained thousands.[163] On December 21, the Uttar Pradesh police said they had arrested over 700 people and detained more than 4,500 others, who were released after warnings.[164]
Those arrested face serious charges including attempted murder, rioting
armed with a deadly weapon, unlawful assembly, assaulting public
servants, damaging public property, and criminal intimidation.[165]
Activists allege that the police targeted Muslim residents in several
districts, raided and looted Muslim homes, and detained and tortured
Muslim men and boys in custody.[166] In January 2020, the Allahabad High Court asked the government for a detailed report on the allegations against police abuse.[167]
The chief minister addressed massive gatherings in support of the CAA
and threatened protesters. “If anyone will raise slogans of Azadi
[freedom] in the name of protest, it will amount to sedition and the
government will take strict action,” Adityanath said at a pro-CAA rally
in Kanpur.[168]
In February 2020, the police in Azamgarh filed a case of sedition
against 35 people and over 100 unidentified persons for participating in
protests against the CAA, and arrested 19 of them.[169]
Alleged Excessive Force by Police
Police have used excessive force including unnecessary lethal force
against protesters in several districts including Aligarh, Meerut,
Kanpur, Bijnor, Sambhal, and Muzaffarnagar.[170]
Out of the 23 people killed in the state during protests since December
2019, one was an 8-year-old boy reportedly killed in a stampede as
protesters fled a police crackdown, while at least 21 others died of
gunshot wounds.[171]
Accounts from witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch,
fact-finding reports by civil society activists, and news reports show
similar patterns in many places where violence took place. Several
deaths in Uttar Pradesh occurred on December 20, 2019, when Muslims
gathered to protest after their Friday noon prayers.[172]
Police dispersed the gathering, beating protesters. Protesters in some
cases responded with violence. Protesters alleged that the police used
teargas, beat protesters with batons, and fired unnecessarily. Police
said they used minimum force, while accusing protesters of pelting
stones, committing arson, and using locally made firearms.
Five Muslim men were killed during protests in Meerut on December 20. All of them died from gunshot wounds.[173]
Three of those – Zaheer Ahmed, Mohsin, and Mohammad Asif – were killed
in the Lisari Gate area. Human Rights Watch met with witnesses who said
the protest at Lisari Gate was initially peaceful. But after police beat
some protesters, people in the Muslim-majority neighborhood became
angry and started throwing stones at police officers. Several witnesses
said that initially the police threw stones back at the protesters, then
they used teargas, and eventually they opened fire with guns. Mohammad
Salim, who lives in the area, said:
It was a peaceful protest. Some of the shops were closed.
Around 2:30 or 3 p.m., some 20 people came running back from the mosque.
They said that the police had been beating people who were holding
protests after Friday prayers. Everyone became very angry. Some younger
people started arguing with the four policemen who were there at the
post close by. Soon the crowd grew. And more police came. The police
were beating people. And people were throwing stones. It was chaotic. I
can accept that some of our youth were angry and at fault. But the
police should not beat people and expect everyone to keep quiet.[174]
According to Shahid, his brother, Zaheer Ahmed, was standing close to
his house, away from the standoff with the police, when he was shot in
the head. “We don’t know why the police killed him,” said Shahid. “He
was not part of the protest. He was just standing there smoking.”[175] Other witnesses confirmed this.
Mohsin’s family members say that he too, was not participating in
protests. “There had been trouble earlier during the protests and Mohsin
was worried that there might be curfew restrictions. He decided to
stock up on cattle fodder in advance, and was killed while he was on his
way,” said his brother, Wasim.[176]
Others said that Mohsin had joined the crowds, but only as an onlooker.
His house is very close to the main protest area. One of his neighbor’s
homes has bullet marks on the wall of its second floor.
Mohammad Asif, 33, was fatally shot in the back. Asif’s home is quite
deep in the labyrinth of lanes in the area, and the family is not sure
how he was shot. “He was an orphan, and he would not have done anything
to make his children orphans,” his sister-in-law said. “He would not
have joined the protest and was likely running away from the trouble.”[177] Human Rights Watch could not corroborate the circumstances of this death.
Police in Meerut initially denied using live ammunition against
protesters, claiming that the deaths and injuries were caused by
protesters who used locally made firearms. However, they said they had
fired in the air to disperse protesters.[178]
A policeman who had bruises from being hit by a stone said: “It was
such a large crowd. They were uncontrollable. They were throwing stones,
coming at us. We could barely hold them off. So many of our people were
injured.”[179]
The police admitted to shooting and killing Mohammad Suleiman, a 20-year-old student, in self-defense during protests in Bijnor.[180]
However, the police have failed to produce the weapon Suleiman
allegedly used or to file a report. On December 28, Suleiman’s family
filed a complaint against six police officers for his killing.
The police also said that violence by the protesters was planned, and
have released photos and videos including one from Meerut that shows
men, their faces covered with scarves, brandishing guns.[181] The police said they have arrested two men who fired weapons during the protests.[182]
One of them, according to the police, is a member of the Popular Front
of India (PFI), a group that says it defends minority rights, but has
been accused in some violent attacks in the past. The Uttar Pradesh
police have also sought a ban on the group, accusing it of instigating
violence during the anti-CAA protests.[183]
PFI denied the allegations saying “the move against PFI is yet another
authoritarian step by the UP police against democratic activism.”[184]
Human Rights Watch is not aware of any evidence that police conducted
credible, impartial investigations into any of these allegations. In
February, the National Human Rights Commission sent a notice to the
Uttar Pradesh government and state police, seeking their response on
allegations of police brutality against protesters.[185]
Arbitrary Arrests and Police Raids
Activists allege the authorities have arbitrarily arrested hundreds
of peaceful demonstrators and activists across the state. While granting
bail to two men accused of attempted murder and rioting, a court in
Bijnor noted the police did not produce any evidence, no weapons were
seized from the accused, and no police personnel had sustained any
bullet injury despite their claims of being targeted by protesters.[186]
Muslim residents in Uttar Pradesh alleged there were arbitrary
arrests. “The police can simply pick up anyone they want. Even right
now. They could just come and take me away, say that I am a dangerous
criminal,” a vegetable vendor in Meerut told Human Rights Watch.[187]
They have alleged the police also used images captured from various
videos and photographs to produce posters seeking arrests of protesters.
In some cases, police detained relatives to force suspects to
surrender, a form of collective punishment. For instance, in Meerut, the
police said they tracked down and arrested 26-year-old Anas for
shooting at them during the protests. Anas’s father, Shakeel-ur-Kallam,
told Human Rights Watch that the police had detained him for 22 hours
until Anas surrendered: “They kept me in the police station and showed
me many photos asking me to identify my son. I said my son is innocent.”[188]
Activists alleged police raided homes without warrants in
Muslim-majority neighborhoods in several places including Lucknow,
Muzaffarnagar, Varanasi, and Bijnor. They alleged the police ransacked
the homes and detained Muslim men, instilling fear among the community.[189]
Said Mohammad Arif, chairman of a Varanasi-based group Centre for
Harmony and Peace, “The state’s behavior has been shameful. There have
been night raids in Muslim neighborhoods in Varanasi threatening people
with notices of damaging public property unless they confess to be
rioters. People are very scared because of the state behavior.”[190]
Police in Muzaffarnagar allegedly entered a madrassa, an Islamic
seminary, on December 20, ransacked it, and detained its cleric and 35
students, 15 of whom were less than 18 years old.[191]
The cleric, Asad Raza, said scores of policemen came following
afternoon prayers, ostensibly looking for those who had protested
earlier that day, but instead went on a rampage inside the madrassa,
destroying property.[192] He said:
When I opened the main gate, the police started beating me.
They broke down every door to find students. They never told us why they
detained us. They just started beating us. They took our mobile phones
and did not return them. They also took some money from the office.
Nothing like this has ever happened here despite communal clashes in the
past.[193]
A January 2020 fact-finding report by rights groups found that 41
children were detained and beaten in police custody in Uttar Pradesh.[194]
One of the earliest protests in Uttar Pradesh began at the Aligarh
Muslim University on December 8, seeking to prevent parliament from
passing the CAA. The protests continued and on December 15, there were
violent clashes with police using batons, teargas, stun grenades, and
shotgun pellets.[195]
Police officers were also injured in the clashes. Some policemen were
seen vandalizing motorcycles outside the university gates at night in
apparent retaliation.[196]
Several students of Aligarh Muslim University, whom police detained after protests, alleged that they were beaten in custody.[197] Police
have filed charges against 52 students including for attempted murder,
rioting, injury to a public servant, and criminal intimidation.[198]
A fact-finding report by civil society activists concluded that the
violence by police against students was “largely unprovoked” and “has
left many of them with shattered bones, grave injuries, deep bruises,
and severe psychological trauma.”[199]
In some places, protesters alleged the violence was orchestrated by right-wing Hindutva organizations.[200]
In other places, non-uniformed men were present alongside the police at
protests and at police raids in Muslim neighborhoods. Bijnor’s
superintendent of police, for instance, described them as “police mitr,” or police friends, appointed to “assist” the police.[201]
Arrest and Mistreatment of Activists in Lucknow
On December 19, a protest was planned in the Uttar Pradesh state
capital, Lucknow. The protest started out peacefully, but later there
was some violence, including arson and stone pelting.
Some well-known human rights defenders and social activists in the
city, including Mohammad Shoaib, a lawyer and head of the rights group
Rihai Manch; SR Darapuri, a retired police officer; and Sandeep Pandey,
an award-winning social activist, were placed under house arrest before
the protests. Shoaib and Darapuri were later taken into custody without a
warrant.[202] Pandey’s
wife, Arundhati Dhuru, and activists Meera Sanghamitra and Madhvi
Kukreja were detained for several hours when they went to the police
station to inquire about Shoaib.[203]
The police took several other activists into custody after the December
19 protest and allegedly beat and abused them in custody. While
granting bail to some of them, a court in Lucknow noted that the police
failed to provide any evidence of their involvement in the violence.[204] Police have denied all allegations of illegal arrests and beatings in police custody.[205]
Shoaib Mohammad, President, Rihai Manch
Police detained Shoaib and later charged him with incitement of
violence, intent to murder, and damage to public property during the
December 19 protests, even though he was under house arrest at that
time. During the hearing of a habeas corpus petition for Shoaib, police
wrongly claimed that they arrested him on December 20. After he was
released on bail on January 17, 2020, Shoaib said he had been jailed
without being produced before a magistrate within 24 hours, as is
required under Indian law.[206]
Shoaib was not the only individual from the group Rihai Manch – which
works to protect the rights of marginalized Muslims, Dalits, and
Adivasis – to be targeted by the police. Several others were forced into
hiding to avoid arrest.[207]
SR Darapuri, Retired Police Officer
A former senior police officer, prominent activist SR Darapuri was
also first placed under house arrest and then arrested. “If they could
do this to a retired Inspector General of Police, I hate to think of
what they are doing to the common man,” he said.[208]
Darapuri said the police in the state were now openly communal: “They
do not bother hiding their bias, as they know they are fully
protected.” Darapuri alleged that the violence at the protests was
orchestrated. He asserted, “The protestors did not create the violence,
others did and their real identities should be disclosed.”[209]
Sadaf Jafar, Activist
Sadaf Jafar, an activist associated with the opposition Congress
party, was arrested on December 19 in Lucknow, when she was filming the
police on her phone after the protest. “The only information her family
got of her arrest was through her live video,” said her niece Simran
Verma. From the film that she managed to share before she was detained,
her relatives knew she had been picked up. “No one told us for two days
her whereabouts,” said Verma. “When we finally saw her, she had been
beaten up.”[210]
Jafar said she was repeatedly beaten by the police in custody and
they made communal and abusive remarks. “They beat me. They mouthed the
filthiest abuses that you won’t be able to print. They did not give me
food and water. I was completely dehumanized,” she told the media.[211] “I had begun to realize what it means to be a Muslim in Amit Shah’s India.”[212]
Deepak Kabir, Theater Artist
When theater artist and cultural activist Deepak Kabir went to
Hazratganj police station to inquire about Jafar on December 20, he too
was arrested. Kabir alleged that he was beaten by over a dozen
policemen, who took turns.[213]
While granting him bail on January 7, 2020, a local court found that
police had failed to provide evidence of his involvement in the violence
during the protests and that his name was not mentioned in the police
complaint filed initially but was added later.[214]
Omar Rashid, Journalist, and Robin Verma, Activist
On December 20, journalist Omar Rashid and activist Robin Verma were
picked up by police at a restaurant outside the BJP office by four
policemen in plainclothes. They were first taken to Hazratganj police
station and then to the Sultanganj police outpost.
Rashid said the police refused to give reasons for the detention and
took away their phones to prevent them from informing anyone.[215] Neither were named in the First Information Report filed by the police on December 19.[216]
Rashid said the police repeatedly brought up his Kashmiri Muslim
identity and questioned him about other Kashmiris, alleging he was
hiding them.[217]
The state’s home minister had earlier said “Stone-pelters from Kashmir
were called to participate” in the anti-CAA protests in Uttar Pradesh.[218]
Rashid was released the same day without any charges, but Verma was
kept in custody until he received bail on January 14, 2020. Verma
alleged that he was beaten, and the police made degrading remarks about
his wife and 2-year-old daughter. “They kicked me, punched me, hit me
with lathis, slapped me, beat me with a thick leather belt and also
plucked out my hair,” he told the media.[219]
Unlawful Measures to Harass and Intimidate
The Uttar Pradesh government has arbitrarily issued notices to at
least 500 people for recovery of public property damaged or destroyed
during the anti-CAA protests.[220]
This is in keeping with the chief minister’s statement vowing to “take
revenge” on those who destroyed public property. Soon after the chief
minister’s statement, state authorities cracked down on Muzaffarnagar district and
sealed nearly 70 shops, accusing them of participating in protests and
damaging public property. The shops belonged mostly to Muslims with low
incomes, and the government took action without providing a legal basis
or evidence of their involvement.[221]
If those who are served notices fail to pay the damages, authorities
have said they will confiscate their property. Some activists, including
Darapuri, Shoaib, and Verma, were also given notices even though they
were under house arrest during the protest in Lucknow.[222]
The authorities have not clarified how they identified the people
served with notices and how they calculated the damages. At time of
writing, the courts had yet to find any of those served guilty of any
wrongdoing.
The government also employed a “name and shame” campaign against
protesters and peaceful activists it had served with notices for damages
by plastering their photographs along with their names and addresses on
billboards across the state, placing them at risk of vigilante
violence.[223]
In March, the Allahabad High Court ordered their immediate removal,
saying they were “illegal” and an “unwarranted interference in privacy.”[224]
The Supreme Court also held that the government’s actions did not have
the “backing of law,” and did not stay the high court order, and yet
referred the matter to a larger bench.[225]
Meanwhile, the Uttar Pradesh government passed the U.P. Recovery of
Damage to Public and Private Property Ordinance, 2020, which would
empower it to recover damages during any protest or demonstration.[226]
IV. Assam’s National Register of Citizens
The ethnic and religious tensions between Assamese speakers,
indigenous or tribal communities, and the Bengali-speaking immigrant
population goes back to the 19th century when the British formally
annexed the territory of Assam in 1826.[227]
After independence, with the partition of the subcontinent and drawing
of international borders, there was an influx of refugees and immigrants
from East Pakistan.[228]
East Pakistan later became independent Bangladesh in 1971, after a war
that brought many refugees into India, including to Assam. This worsened
the tensions, leading to violence and an armed insurgency.[229]
Irregular migration to Assam continued even after Bangladesh became
an independent nation, but there is no accurate data and the numbers of
migrants often have been inflated for political purposes.[230] Economist Vani Kant Barooah writes:
[A]ll Bengali Muslims in Assam have become convenient
proxies for illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; they are often collectively
labelled “Muslim immigrants” even though they might have been settled in
Assam for generations. Consequently, what is overtly billed as an
economic issue – a struggle over land and livelihood between indigenous
people and people who are in the state illegally – covertly morphs into a
communal issue predicated upon an economic and cultural struggle with
the “other,” regardless of the legitimacy of the “other’s” presence in
Assam.[231]
Anti-Foreigner Movement
There have been a number of laws and policies adopted by the central
and Assam state governments since 1947 to address irregular migration,
especially from neighboring countries.[232]
In 1951, when the first population census was conducted after
independence, the Ministry of Home Affairs directed a NRC to be prepared
in Assam.[233]
The NRC registers were initially kept in the district administration
offices, but in the early 1960s were transferred to the police to help
detect and verify irregular immigrants.[234]
Following the 1961 census report, which said that over 220,000
“infiltrants” had entered Assam from East Pakistan, in 1962 the central
government adopted the Prevention of Infiltration into India of
Pakistani Nationals plan.[235]
The authorities deported people to East Pakistan without due process
even though India did not have a formal extradition agreement with
Pakistan.[236]
In response to growing criticism over forced deportation of nearly
200,000 people, most of them Bengali Muslims, as well as threats from
Pakistan to raise the issue at the United Nations, the government passed
the Foreigners (Tribunal) Order in September 1964, to allow those
suspected of being irregular immigrants to contest police claims in
tribunals that were to be headed by someone with “judicial experience.”[237]
However, the 1965 India-Pakistan war and the 1971 war for the
liberation of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh led to a
change in policy. Thousands of Bengali Hindus fled to India and the
central government decided not to deport people seeking refuge as a
result of religious persecution.[238]
In March 1979, in the lead-up to by-elections after the death of a
member of parliament, allegations that a large number of so-called
“illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh were listed as voters led to the
start of “anti-foreigner” agitation. The All Assam Students’ Union
(AASU) launched a movement in June 1979, demanding “detection,
disenfranchisement, and deportation” of foreigners.[239]
The agitation led by AASU and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad
(AAGSP) continued to escalate, and with it so did tensions between
Assamese, immigrant, and tribal communities. At the same time, militant
Assamese nationalists moved from political agitation to a full-scale
secessionist armed insurrection led by the United Liberation Front of
Asom (ULFA).[240]
Tensions peaked during the elections of February 1983 when thousands
of Bengali-speaking Muslims and hundreds of Assamese and tribal people
were killed in communal massacres and retaliatory attacks.[241]
The most violent incident, often referred to as the “Nellie massacre,”
occurred on February 18, 1983, when at least 1,800 people, mostly
Bengali Muslims, were killed.[242]
Following these massacres, the central government passed the Illegal
Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT) in 1983 to detect
irregular immigrants who had arrived since March 1971 and expel them.[243] Unlike the Foreigners Act, however, the IMDT law placed the burden of proof on the complainant or the police.[244]
Critics of the law alleged the change in burden of proof contributed
to an increase in irregular immigration of Bengali Muslims from
Bangladesh.[245] The law was challenged by the former head of the AASU in the Supreme Court, and was struck down in 2005 in Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India.[246]The
Supreme Court ruled that “the influx of Bangladeshi nationals who have
illegally migrated into Assam pose a threat to the integrity and
security of north-eastern region,” and that the law failed to protect
“against external aggression and internal disturbance.”[247]
Several constitutional experts have noted the judgment “relied upon
unverified – and now disproved – data to hold that migration amounted to
‘external aggression’ upon India.” By striking down the law, the court
established that the burden to prove citizenship lies upon the
individual accused of being a foreigner.[248]
Assam Accord
The 1985 Assam Accord ended the violence. The Asom Gana Parishad
(AGP) party, which supported the goals of the anti-foreigner movement,
won state elections. The accord, signed between the AASU, the state
government of Assam, and the central government led by Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi, called for the expulsion of all immigrants who had entered
Assam illegally after March 24, 1971, and a 10-year disenfranchisement
of irregular immigrants who had entered the state between 1966 and 1971.
Those who came to Assam before January 1, 1966 were granted Indian
citizenship.[249] The 1955 Citizenship Act was amended in 1985 in line with the Assam Accord.[250]
Doubtful Voters
In 1997, the Election Commission of India reviewed the electoral roll
in Assam and marked a “D” (Doubtful voter) against the names of those
persons who could not prove their citizenship status. The “D” voters
were barred from contesting elections and casting their votes. Their
cases were forwarded by the electoral registration officers to the local
police who then referred them to the relevant tribunals for the
determination of their citizenship. A total of 231,657 “D” references
were made to the authorities in 1998.[251] The mass disenfranchisement was challenged by constitutional experts as being unconstitutional.[252]
Updating the National Register of Citizens
In July 2009, Assam Public Works, a nongovernmental organization,
filed a case in the Supreme Court claiming that 4.1 million illegal
immigrants’ names had been included in Assam’s electoral rolls.[253] Later,
the AASU became an intervener in the case and Supreme Court asked the
government in December 2014 to expedite updating the NRC.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court relied on a 2004 government estimate
of 12 million illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in India as of December
2001, of which 5 million were in Assam. However, the court overlooked a
clarification by the government that the figures were not based on any
comprehensive or sample study. In reply to a Right to Information
request in October 2018, the government reiterated that it was not
possible to have an accurate estimate of illegal immigrants, including
Bangladeshi migrants in the country.[254]
The NRC update process began in 2015 and was monitored by the Supreme
Court. The verification process collected two sets of documents from
Assam residents. List A was legacy data, which included the 1951 NRC and
electoral rolls up to March 24, 1971 to prove that the applicant’s
ancestors lived in Assam before 1971. List B documents or linkage
documents – for instance birth certificates – established the
relationship of the applicant to the List A documents of their parents
or grandparents.[255] The NRC then verified the documents, ostensibly creating a family tree for each applicant.
Over 33 million people submitted applications to enroll their names in the updated NRC.[256]
On August 31, 2019, the final NRC was published and did not include
the names of over 1.9 million (1,906,657) residents of Assam whose
citizenship claims could not be verified.[257]
Those excluded from the list were given 120 days to file an appeal at a
Foreigner Tribunal. They could appeal tribunal decisions at the Gauhati
High Court, and finally at the Supreme Court.[258]
Flawed Verification Procedure
Politicians across party lines have criticized the final NRC. The
AASU said the number of those excluded should have been higher. BJP
lawmakers said not enough “illegal Bangladeshis” – a euphemism for
Bengali Muslims – were excluded, and that many Bengali Hindus had been
left out. Ananta Kumar Malo, a lawmaker from the All India United
Democratic Front, who was excluded from the NRC even as his family
members were included, also gave voice to such sentiment: “Thousands of
genuine Indians — especially Bengali Hindus — have been left out of it,
and so many illegal foreigners have made it.”[259]
The process has been so fraught that a nongovernmental organization,
Citizens for Justice and Peace, reported that 56 people have died in
Assam since 2015 allegedly over fears related to their citizenship
status. According to the group, 48 people allegedly committed suicide
because of fear of being declared an irregular foreigner, or fear of
detention, or because of inability to provide required documentation
during the NRC process. Eight others died in detention centers due to
alleged negligence of authorities.[260]
In November 2019, the government told parliament that between 2016 and
October 2019, 28 detainees had died either in detention centers or
hospitals where they were referred.[261]
Exclusion on Technical Grounds
Lawyers and journalists have found some people were not registered
because of technical reasons such as variations in spelling of names in
the various documents.[262] Sometimes, several people with the same name showed up in old records, creating confusion, said NRC officials.[263]
Aslam (name changed) is excluded from the NRC even though his
parents, most of his siblings, his wife, and his children are included.
He was likely excluded, he said, because the spelling of his name on his
voter identification card and PAN card (identification card to file
taxes) are different. “The form for the PAN card is in English but we
fill the forms for the voter identity card in Assamese. Then when they
change it into English, the spelling of name often changes.” [264]
Systematic Discrimination
The NRC segregated the people in Assam into “original” and
“non-original” inhabitants – with Bengali and Nepali speaking minorities
largely making up the non-original category.[265] Different criteria were used to verify claims of “original” or “non-original” inhabitants by the NRC authorities.[266] The Citizenship Rules and the Supreme Court did not define “original inhabitants” or a procedure to identify them.[267]
Prateek Hajela, Assam state coordinator for the NRC and the man in
charge of the entire process, explained that local authorities have
discretionary powers: “Clause 3(3) contemplates a less strict and
vigorous process for deciding claims for inclusion in the NRC insofar as
persons who are originally inhabitants of the State of Assam are
concerned.”[268]
Of the total 32.9 million applications, about 4.8 million were made
using a residency certificate issued by the gram panchayat, an elected
village council, as the list B (linkage) document.[269] In March 2017, the Gauhati High Court ordered
that a gram panchayat certificate has no statutory basis and cannot be
used as a linking document. In December 2017, the Supreme Court modified the rule, allowing the use of the document, subject to verification of its authenticity.[270]
The NRC authorities said 1.74 million of these applications were deemed
to be from “original inhabitants,” and their certificates were accepted
while all others needed to go through a two-step verification process.[271]
Arbitrary and Inconsistent
Activists and lawyers also contend that the Assam process lacked sufficient oversight, leading to inconsistencies.[272]
The NRC allowed “D” or “doubtful” voters to apply for inclusion but did
not include their names unless the Foreigners Tribunals – statutory
authorities set up to detect irregular immigrants in Assam – declared
them as citizens. There are still more than 120,000 people arbitrarily
marked as doubtful voters.
In May 2018, the state coordinator for the NRC sent
a notice to all districts saying siblings and other family members of
those “declared foreigners” will also be put on hold and not included in
the NRC until the tribunals decide their fate. He also sent an order to
the border police authorities, requiring them to refer family members
of “declared foreigners” to the tribunals.[273]
Once a person’s case was referred to a tribunal, they could no longer
be included in the NRC until their citizenship was determined.
Based on the same documents, while some members of Bibek’s (name changed) family were included as citizens, others were not.[274]
Bibek, 40, a Bengali-speaking Hindu from the Dalit community who
teaches Assamese in a government school in Baksa district, his family
came from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1964. “My father was 16 when
he came from East Pakistan. He tells us that we came here because of
the atrocities on Hindus there,” he said.[275]
Bibek’s mother is included in the NRC and his two sisters, who are
married, are also included. But his father, wife, and 9-year-old son are
not. Although they submitted nearly identical documents, some members
of the family were told that they did not provide proper legacy data.[276]
Bibek said he is worried about biased Foreigners Tribunals: “It doesn’t
matter what documents we have, if our language is Bengali, we are
excluded. I am worried that if we do not get citizenship, I will also
lose my job.”[277]
Shalini (name changed), 35, a Bengali-speaking Hindu and her siblings
were excluded from the NRC, but her children were included. Shalini, a
cook in a government school in Baksa district, earns 1000 rupees (US$14)
a month and is worried about the legal costs and of losing her job.
“The government has brought this hardship on us,” she said. “We were
born here. How are we Bangladeshis?[278]
One man said his 6-year-old niece had been excluded from the NRC. “My
sister, her husband, her son – were included in the NRC. But her
6-year-old daughter’s name was not there. They will have to fight the
case for the citizenship of a 6-year-old now,” he said.[279]
Foreigners Tribunals
The Foreigners Tribunals were first set up in 1964 to allow those
suspected of being irregular immigrants to contest police claims.[280]
The rules have been altered over time, but allegations persist that
these tribunals, led by officials without judicial experience and
operating without a set of uniform standards, have been arbitrary,
discriminatory, inconsistent, and error-ridden.[281]
Until the NRC, Foreigners Tribunals tried two kinds of cases: those
referred to them by officials of the Assam Border Police Organization,
who are empowered to ask any “suspected citizen” for citizenship
documents, and those designated “D” or doubtful voters by the Election
Commission.[282] The burden of proof in both cases is on the person whose citizenship is contested, and not the state.[283]
In May 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs expanded the 1964
Foreigners (Tribunal) Order to allow individuals who have been excluded
from the NRC to approach the tribunals.[284]
In August 2019, there were 100 Foreigners Tribunals in Assam. According
to government data, between 1985 and March 2019, the tribunals declared
117,164 people as irregular immigrants.[285] The government announced an additional 221 tribunals to handle the appeals of those excluded from the NRC.[286] Over 200,000 cases were already pending at the tribunals before the NRC-related cases, according to some reports.[287]
Over the years, the government has relaxed the eligibility of members who preside over the Foreigners Tribunals.[288]
Constitutional lawyers and academics contend that tribunals do not
follow standard procedural law, are not led by people with any judicial
experience, and are not independent. Mohsin Alam Bhat, executive
director of the Centre for Public Interest Law at Jindal Global Law
School, told Human Rights Watch:
Tribunal members are given a year long tenure and they are
subject to further extension depending on government evaluation of their
performance. This is not what a tribunal looks like. This is what a
government committee looks like. This is not how any judicial
institution works as an independent institution in the world. Therefore,
people may raise concerns over lack of neutrality and objectivity.[289]
While other judicial courts are regulated either by the Civil
Procedure Code or the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Foreigners
Tribunals have unchecked power to regulate their own procedure, leaving
them without effective oversight.[290]
Lawyers allege tribunals often abuse this power. “Very often, they
don’t issue summons to witnesses, stating that the burden of proof is on
the accused. After declaring a person a foreigner, many tribunals don’t
provide certified copies of relevant documents required to challenge
the order,” said Aman Wadud, a lawyer.[291]
Foreigners Tribunals lack transparency and fail to follow uniform
procedure. Members lack independence and are vulnerable to pressure from
the authorities to declare more people, mostly Bengali and Muslim, as
foreigners.[292] A former member of Foreigners Tribunals told Human Rights Watch:
I admit that there might be arbitrary actions by Foreigners
Tribunals because there is an internal government policy that more and
more people should be deemed foreigners. We are hired on the basis of
contracts – those with records of declaring more and more people as
foreigners are preferred.[293]
Human Rights Watch found that once a person is cleared by one
tribunal, they can still be brought again before the same or different
tribunals. People can be denied citizenship claims if there is a
mismatch in the spelling of their names on different documents, for not
mentioning certain facts in the written statements, or minor
contradictions in deposition testimony from witnesses. Lack of competent
legal representation can often deprive them their citizenship.
The case of Ashish (name changed), 58, a Bengali Hindu daily wage
worker in Baksa district, and his family exemplifies how the tribunals
can be arbitrary and error-ridden. Ashish, his father, and his brother
were referred by the border police as suspected irregular immigrants.
His brother and father were declared Indian citizens by a tribunal in
October 2014. Ashish was also declared a citizen by a Foreigners
Tribunal in February 2018.[294]
However, Ashish’s name was not included in the NRC and therefore he has
to go through the process of proving his citizenship again.[295]
Meanwhile, his brother was once again deemed suspect by the border
police and this time was declared an irregular foreigner by a tribunal.
His appeal is pending in Gauhati High Court, even as he was verified in
the NRC.
Salima (name changed), 45, a Bengali Muslim in Barpeta district, was
marked as a doubtful voter in 1997, and was declared an irregular
foreigner in February 2019. Even though her relatives were all confirmed
citizens and she had the same documentation they had, the Foreigners
Tribunal rejected Salima’s claim.[296]
Her lawyer believes this is because when Salima was giving oral
evidence at the tribunal she was not able to properly explain her case,
as often occurs in rural communities where people can be uncertain about
ages and other details. “Litigants are poor, they do not understand the
consequences,” he said. “She was not able to tell the court that she
had a stepmother, and also how many brothers and sisters she had and
their exact ages.”[297]
Rashid (name changed), 39, a Bengali Muslim mechanic in Barpeta
district, was marked as a doubtful voter in 1997, and received a notice
from a Foreigners Tribunal in 2017. He was declared an irregular
foreigner in 2018. However, the same tribunal found his mother and
sister – both marked as doubtful voters – to be Indian citizens.[298]
Rashid told Human Rights Watch: “Even though my mother testified before
the tribunal in my case, the member said that he had doubts that she
was my mother. So, I told the court to take my DNA test but they
refused, asking me to appeal to the high court instead.”[299]
Junaid (name changed) was declared an irregular foreigner in 2018 by a
tribunal in Kamrup district. However, the same tribunal had approved
his brother Karim (name changed) the year before. Both men had submitted
the same legacy documents to show that their family had been living in
Assam since 1947. The cases were presided over by the same member at the
tribunal.[300]
In March 2019, a tribunal in Barpeta declared Arshad (name changed),
50, a Bengali Muslim, an irregular foreigner. The tribunal refused to
admit electoral rolls as evidence to show the link between Arshad and
his father because Arshad’s name was spelled incorrectly.[301]
Arshad told Human Rights Watch that he was terrified and was unable to
give oral evidence to the satisfaction of the presiding officer at the
tribunal. “I didn’t understand anything going on in court. I didn’t even
know what it means to be declared a foreigner until the people who are
helping us to apply for bail told me,” Arshad said.[302]
In many cases, people do not even get a chance to present their
claims. Their cases are decided ex-parte, that is, in their absence.
Lawyers in Assam said this is largely because the border police fail to
carry out proper investigations and serve timely notices to the people.
Between 1985 and February 2019, 63,959 people were declared foreigners
through ex-parte proceedings.[303]
Although the Foreigners (Tribunal) Order says the tribunals should
communicate the main grounds on which a person is deemed foreign and
give them a reasonable opportunity to produce evidence in support of
their case, this is often ignored.[304]
Lawyers and civil society activists say police failure to deliver the
notices is one of the main reasons that in over half of the cases where
people were declared irregular foreigners – it was through ex-parte
orders.[305] Said Guwahati-based lawyer Zakir Hussain, who has been representing people in these tribunals:
It is routine for Foreigners Tribunals not to offer police
reports. I think this is unfair because people should be given a copy to
give them an adequate opportunity to put up a proper defense. They
should know what the allegations against them are, who the witnesses
are, and what they have said against them.[306]
The Assam government has said the ex-parte orders are necessary
because people move out when they come to know of an investigation
against them. In some cases, the government said, people have appeared
before the tribunals on receipt of the notice but then drop off. Lawyers
and activists contend it is because many are laborers who often migrate
in search of work. In other cases, when people do receive a notice,
they do not have the money to hire a lawyer. And people who are
illiterate or uninformed may not understand the consequences of what the
notice means.[307]
Muzibur Rahman, an assistant sub-inspector in the Indian Border
Security Force, and his wife were declared irregular foreigners in
December 2018 by a tribunal. Rahman, a Bengali Muslim, was posted in
Punjab and had not received the notice. He was unaware of the tribunal’s
decision until his father was informed by the NRC authorities in August
2019 that the couple was not eligible for inclusion.[308]
After they had been marked “doubtful” voters by the Election
Commission, the border police referred their cases to Foreigners
Tribunal in 2010, which issued a joint ex-parte order against 28 people,
including Rahman and his wife, without their knowledge. Rahman has
filed an appeal at the Gauhati High Court. [309]
Police Failure to Conduct Proper Investigations
In State of Assam v. Moslem Mondal in 2013, the Gauhati High
Court, responding to petitioners who alleged that the police often
failed to conduct a fair investigation and referred people to tribunals
for doubtful citizenship without even visiting them or giving them an
opportunity to prove their citizenship said, “There has to be a fair and
proper investigation by the investigating agency before making a
reference to the tribunal.” Noting a lack of uniform procedure by
tribunals for serving notices to people suspected of being irregular
immigrants, the court laid down certain guidelines to ensure everyone
receives fair proceedings.[310]
However, lawyers practicing in the state assert that Assam border
police often do not conduct proper investigations before referring cases
to the tribunals. “A large number of verification reports of the
inquiry officer are almost blank which only proves that there is no
proper investigation,” said lawyer Aman Wadud.[311]
There are also allegations that police make false statements in the
inquiry, including claims that they have delivered notices, which can
lead to an unfair ex-parte ruling. “In some cases, we have unfortunately
seen that police file false reports,” lawyer Zakir Hussain told Human
Rights Watch. “In most of these cases, weak and poor persons are
targeted.”[312]
For instance, a retired officer of the Indian army, Mohammed
Sanaullah, 52, a Bengali Muslim, was detained for 10 days after he was
declared an irregular foreigner by a tribunal in May 2019. When he was
arrested, he was serving as an assistant sub-inspector in the border
police. He was discharged from his duties the day after the tribunal
order. The police inquiry report says the officer visited Sanaullah at
his village home in Kalahikash in Kamrup district on May 23, 2008, and
that he was unable to produce proper documents. The report claims to
have taken Sanaullah’s statement and thumb impression as proof. The
report added that the officer met Sanaullah again on July 27, 2009 at
the village home and took his signature on the report.[313]
Sanaullah told the tribunal that the police report was “completely
false and fabricated” because on the dates mentioned, he was posted in
Manipur and could not have met the inquiry officer. The police report
also listed Sanaullah’s profession as laborer, further evidence that the
officer never met him. Although Sanaullah submitted numerous documents
to prove his citizenship, the tribunal declared him a foreigner on May
23, 2019, citing witness statements as well as several discrepancies in
ages and the spelling of the names of various family members.[314]
Sanaullah, who was released on bail in June 2019, said, “This is the
reward I got after serving for 30 years in the Indian army. I am an
Indian, very much an Indian and will forever remain an Indian.”[315]
Detention Centers in Violation of International Standards
Once a tribunal declares a person a foreigner, they can be detained under section 4 of the Foreigners Act.[316]
Currently, there are six makeshift foreigner detention centers in
prisons across Assam. The central government told the parliament that
988 people were detained in these centers as of November 2019.[317]
The government has said it will build 10 detention centers in the state
for those who are declared foreigners, and is building the first one in
Goalpara district that reportedly can accommodate up to 3,000
detainees.[318]
A fact-finding report
released in June 2018 by the National Human Rights Commission found
that people are detained in these centers with no prospect of release
and without adequate legal representation. The centers are administered
like prisons, the detainees treated as convicted prisoners.[319] The report found that the detention centers also separated children from their parents.[320]
According to the state government, 25 people have died in foreigner
detention centers over the past 34 years, including 7 who died in 2019.[321]
However, the central government told parliament in November 2019 that
between 2016 and October 2019, 28 detainees had died either in detention
centers or hospitals where they were referred.[322]
While the authorities say the deaths were largely due to illness,
family members blame them on poor facilities and negligence by the
authorities.[323] In October 2019, the state government formed a special review committee to assess the conditions in detention centers.
In May 2019, the Supreme Court directed the state government to
conditionally release detainees who had completed over three years in
detention.[324]
In a reply to a question in parliament, the central government said 335
detainees had been detained for over three years as of June 2019.[325]
In September 2019, a civil society panel that included retired judges
said the courts had failed to ease the hardships faced by the people.
“Judicial orders have set difficult conditions for release from
detention camps – conditions that cannot be met by marginalized and
vulnerable people,” the report said.[326]
Meesha (name changed), a Bengali Muslim, from Bongaigaon district,
was declared an irregular foreigner in February 2016 and detained
immediately. As of September 2019, she was still detained. Her husband
filed a review of her case in the same tribunal three days later, but it
was dismissed. In July 2017, the Gauhati High Court upheld the tribunal
order. Her family filed a review of that order but in November 2017,
that too, was dismissed. Her husband told Human Rights Watch that the
legal costs had reduced him to penury – he has sold his business, his
cattle, and is in debt. “I feel like I have gone mad,” he said.[327]
As of September 2019, Jamaal (name changed), 49, a Bengali Muslim
vegetable seller from Bongaigaon district, has been detained in Goalpara
prison since July 2016, after he was declared an irregular foreigner.[328]
The tribunal order said Jamaal had failed to establish a link with his
father since his father’s name was spelled differently in different
documents.[329]
Jamaal’s detention and the money spent on fighting his case has taken a
toll on the family. His wife said, “I have spent about 150,000 rupees
(US$2100) on the case so far. My husband also has to buy food in the
detention center because they barely give him any. My husband has health
problems. So, we buy the medicines for him, but we have to give the
police extra money to be able to get the medicine to him.”[330]
Farhana (name changed), 49, a Bengali Muslim from Bongaigaon
district, was in detention as of September 2019 in Kokrajhar district
since July 2016. The tribunal declared her an irregular foreigner in an
ex-parte order in March 2016 because she had failed to appear despite
notices being served to her three times since March 2014. Farhana filed a
petition in the high court saying she did not receive the notices, but
the court did not accept her statement and upheld the tribunal’s
judgment in June 2016.[331] Her son said he was so desperate to get her released that he even fell prey to fraud. He said:
A man came and told us that he worked for the police and
offered to get her released and took 50,000 rupees ($700) from us. He
said, “Your mother is sick so we can get her released through a sick
certificate,” and that he needed the money for the certificate. But he
never showed up again.[332]
V. Recommendations
To the Indian Parliament
Repeal the Citizenship Amendment
Act, 2019, and ensure that any future national asylum and refugee policy
does not discriminate on any grounds, including religion, and is
compliant with international legal standards.
Repeal Sections 14A and 18(2)(ia) of the Citizenship Act, 1955, on the issue of national identity cards and its procedures.
Repeal the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003.
Amend citizenship laws to grant
nationality to all children born on Indian territory if the child would
otherwise be stateless, regardless of the immigration status of the
parents.
Amend citizenship laws to reduce
statelessness by granting citizenship to habitual residents of India who
have always been stateless and who have genuine and effective links to
India.
To the Government of India
Discard any plan for a nationwide
citizenship verification project until there are public consultations
to establish standardized procedures and due process protections
ensuring the process is not discriminatory and does not impose undue
hardship on the poor, minority communities, and women.
Protect the rights to freedom of
expression and assembly of those protesting against the government’s
citizenship law and policies.
Ensure prompt, credible, and
impartial investigations into the killings of protesters, allegations of
use of excessive force by police, arbitrary detention, torture in
custody, and raids on Muslims homes and property.
Release all those arbitrarily
detained for protesting against the citizenship law and dismiss
politically motivated charges against protesters and civil society
activists.
Investigate hate speech by government officials and appropriately prosecute incitement to violence.
Order Uttar Pradesh authorities to
withdraw all notices to residents for damages in relation to protests
against the citizenship law, return any money collected through the
notices so far, and do not attempt to collect any losses without a
credible, transparent investigation and judicial oversight.
On Internet Shutdowns
Immediately restore the internet in all states where it was shut down to prevent protests against the citizenship law.
Direct all states to follow the
procedure laid down in the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services
(Public Emergency and Public Safety) Rules, 2017 to ensure shutdowns are
considered carefully with adequate oversight.[333]
Amend the Telecom Suspension
Rules to require issuing authorities to exhaust all available
alternatives before issuing an internet shutdown order. The rules should
make it necessary to provide adequate notice to the general public
before shutdowns are imposed, clearly specifying the duration for which
each shutdown is expected to remain in place. Any extensions of existing
shutdowns should be notified.
Revise the Telecom Suspension
Rules to require government agencies to make internet shutdown orders
publicly accessible. The rules should also make it necessary to make
public the frequency of Review Committee meetings to review the shutdown
orders and the decisions taken at these meetings.
To the Union Home Ministry, Union Territory Police, State Home Ministries, and State Police
Ensure that state security forces
comply with the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and
Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. In particular, require that
police apply, as far as possible, nonviolent means before resorting to
the use of force, use force only in proportion to the seriousness of the
offense, and use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect
life.
Strictly enforce laws and
guidelines on arrest and detention, as set forth in the Code of Criminal
Procedure and the Supreme Court’s D.K. Basu decision.[334]
In training and practice, emphasize the requirement that police record
all arrests and detentions, promptly inform a relative of arrested
persons, produce suspects before a magistrate within 24 hours, and
provide required medical examinations of suspects in custody.
Ensure that police officers
implicated in torture and other ill-treatment, regardless of rank, are
disciplined or prosecuted as appropriate.
Clearly and unequivocally
signal, through statements and measures by state officials and
high-ranking police officials, that the use of torture or other
ill-treatment in police custody is unacceptable, unlawful, and will not
be tolerated. Explicitly define acceptable interrogation techniques
consistent with international standards in police rules and manuals.
Require police, upon the arrest or any informal detention of a suspect, to recite the suspect’s basic rights under the D.K. Basu decision and the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Basu recitation
should include a clear statement of the charge and the suspect’s rights
to consult with an attorney, inform others of detention, and receive a
medical examination.
To the State Government of Assam
Ensure people who have been
excluded from the National Register of Citizens or those with pending
cases in Foreigners Tribunals are not deprived of any social welfare
benefits guaranteed to citizens of the country.
Reform Foreigners Tribunals to
ensure their compliance with international standards, including
provision of fair procedures and proper oversight.
Ensure that the Foreigners
Tribunals provide ample opportunity and fair chance to those excluded
from the National Register of Citizens to appeal.
Establish open and transparent procedures for hearing petitions for citizenship, subject to judicial review.
Significantly reduce the use of
detention for irregular foreigners, and ensure that migration detention
is lawful, necessary, proportionate, and used only as a last resort.
Introduce a statutory time limit for detaining irregular foreigners.
To Concerned Governments and Inter-Governmental Organizations
Urge the Indian government to discard plans for a nationwide National Register of Citizens.
Call on the Indian government to
protect rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and release all those
arbitrarily detained for protesting against the citizenship law.
Urge the Indian government to
ensure that the citizenship verification process in Assam is transparent
and non-discriminatory and does not target minorities,
disproportionately harm women, or result in arbitrary loss of
citizenship rights.
Urge the Indian government to
ensure that amendment to citizenship laws does not discriminate on
grounds prohibited under international law.
Communicate to the government of
India that any actions resulting in large-scale losses of citizenship
rights would seriously impact their international and bilateral
relations with India and would require the attention of international
and UN mechanisms, including the UN Human Rights Council, special
rapporteurs, and other entities.
Encourage the UN Secretary
General and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to use their good
offices to offer recommendations and advice to the government of India
on the citizenship issues impacted by the government’s past and proposed
actions.
Encourage India to invite the UN
Special Rapporteurs on minority issues, on contemporary forms of
racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and
on freedom of religion or belief on fact-finding visits.
Provide support for Indian civil
society groups and lawyers who are assisting applicants in the legal
process to prove their citizenship.
Speak out publicly and privately
about any concerns with government harassment or prosecution of persons
working on citizenship issues or criticizing the government for their
actions related to citizenship issues.
Take any appropriate action at
the local level, through embassies and representations, to react to any
instance of institutional harassment, arbitrary arrests, and prosecution
of peaceful activists, journalists, and lawyers, including by voicing
concerns with authorities, attending trials, issuing statements and
demarches, and visiting unjustly jailed detainees.
Make public statements, including
at the UN Human Rights Council, raising the concerns outlined above and
initiate more formal Council action if required.
Acknowledgments
This report was researched and written by Jayshree Bajoria, a
research consultant in the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. It was
edited by Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director. Specialist reviews
were provided by Bill Frelick, director of the Refugee Rights Division,
Heather Barr, acting co-director of the Women’s Rights Division, and
advocates in Brussels, Washington D.C., and Geneva. James Ross, legal
and policy director, and Joseph Saunders, deputy program director,
provided legal and programmatic review. Production assistance was
provided by Racqueal Legerwood, Asia coordinator; Travis Carr,
Publications coordinator; and Fitzroy Hepkins, administrative manager.
Human Rights Watch acknowledges
the valuable assistance of several Indian rights activists and
organizations, including the team at Citizens Against Hate, and lawyers
in Assam and New Delhi.
We are particularly indebted to our external reviewers including
Gautam Bhatia, an expert on Indian constitutional law, for providing
valuable input and feedback on the legal analysis in the report.
Above all, we thank all the people who shared their stories with us.
A demonstrator holds a placard during a protest organized by
various Muslim organizations and opposition parties against India's new
citizenship law in Chennai on Feb. 19. Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images
Firoza Bano, 50, sat worried in her home in the northern Indian
city of Jaipur. Born in the north Indian state of Rajasthan in 1970, she
has barely traveled outside the state—but now she faces the possibility
of being kicked out of her home country. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed all-India National Register of Citizens
(NRC) will require Bano to prove she’s Indian. If she’s unable to
produce the requisite documents, she might lose her citizenship and be
declared an infiltrator. At best, she might spend months in one of the
detention centers being built across the country to house the newly
created refugees—at worst, she could be deported to a country she’s
never known or be left stateless.
“My mother gave birth to me at home. My birth was never registered,
so how do I produce a certificate?” Bano said. “Nor do I have land
ownership or tenancy records dating back five decades. Although we’re
law-abiding citizens, having lived peacefully in India all our lives, we
might be thrown out of the country.”
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Last December, India passed the CAA, which provides a route to
citizenship to members of six religious minority communities from
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan—but not for Muslims. Coupled with
the NRC, a supposedly definitive list of Indian citizens, the provision
is facing criticism for being anti-Muslim and unconstitutional.
A similar list in Assam has already been used to single out Indian-born
Muslims for potential deportation. And while members of other faiths
now have the shield of the CAA as a route back into Indian citizenship
if they’re branded as illegal by the NRC process, Muslims have no such
respite.
That’s a big problem. Even today, 38 percent of Indian children under the age of 5 do not have birth certificates.
Even today, 38 percent of Indian children under the age of 5 do not have birth certificates.
Other documents can substitute, but they’re also often
lacking—especially for older people. The reasons for this are
varied—lack of awareness, inaccessible registration centers, and no
immediate requirement for these certificates to access social services.
Government data shows that 6.8 million births
were not registered in India in 2015-2016, and the situation is worse
for older residents, who were born when home births were more prevalent
in the country.
There’s a gulf between government rhetoric on the NRC and what
critics believe—but the record of an increasingly hard-right Hindu
nationalist government under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) makes the
government’s word seem dubious at best. There has been a systematic
scapegoating of Muslims under BJP rule. Human Rights Watch published a report
in 2019, observing that the party uses “communal rhetoric” to spur “a
violent vigilante campaign,” whereby radical cow protection groups lynched
44 people to death, 36 of them Muslims, between May 2015 and December
2018. Prior to its landslide win in the 2019 elections, the BJP also
used religious polarization as a campaigning tool, making promises such as the expedited construction of a temple in place of a demolished mosque in Ayodhya.
After the CAA bill was signed into law, widespread protests erupted across the country, killing 25 people so far and leaving thousands in police detention. The government has downplayed the NRC, stating that it has no plans of conducting the NRC exercise across the country on religious lines.
That comes despite regular rhetoric from the BJP on supposed
infiltrators from Muslim countries. In the state of West Bengal, for
instance, BJP chief Dilip Ghosh recently stated
that the center was committed to “throwing out” 10 million Bangladeshi
Muslim “infiltrators” from the state and that those opposing the move
were “anti-Hindu, anti-Bengali and anti-India.”
Addressing a huge election rally in New Delhi on Dec. 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said
the CAA/NRC had nothing to do with Indian Muslims and that “no Indian
Muslims will be sent to any detention centers.” The speech was accused of being a “combination of falsehoods and half-truths.” Critics have called
the CAA/NRC the “greatest act of social poisoning by a government in
independent India,” aimed at making the country a Hindu state and
turning a large number of Muslims into stateless subjects.
Zakia Soman, a co-founder of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan
(BMMA), a nationwide rights organization for Muslims, said the
“diabolical” developments have led to great apprehension in the Muslim
community, which makes up 14.2 percent
of the Indian population. Many Muslims have approached BMMA to
understand and prepare for the repercussions. The organization has
launched posters raising awareness and community meetings in 15 states
across the country.
“Since CAA is so discriminatory, it has given way to fear that even
if people have their documents in place, they will be left out of NRC.
Ordinary people think, and not without substance, that this is an
attempt to rob them of their citizenship,” Soman said.
As secular Indians protest a controversial new
citizenship law, some debate whether they should demonstrate as Muslims
first or as Indians who happen to be Muslim.
Rais Shaikh, a member of the legislative assembly in the western
Indian state of Maharashtra, said the CAA-NRC combination has created
panic across the community. “I have had 75-year-old men and women
approaching me, asking for help with documents,” he said. “At least 500
people visit my office every day, expressing similar concerns. Most of
them are now running around to ready their documents, approaching
lawyers and agents. They’re scared of being stripped of their
citizenship.”
The northeastern state of Assam is the only Indian state to have an NRC, first prepared in 1951 and updated
in 2019. Assam’s 33 million residents had to substantiate their
citizenship through documents, proving that they came to India before
neighboring Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971. The final
list, published in August 2019, left 1.9 million applications out. The
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom subsequently alleged
that the Assam NRC was a tool to “target religious minorities and … to
render Muslims stateless.” The detention centers have already been
constructed there.
With Assam as the precedent, the Muslim community fears persecution. Maulana Khalid Rasheed, the head of the Islamic Centre of India
in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, started a helpline two weeks
ago to quell fears and create awareness among the community. He receives
at least 150 calls daily from Muslims worried about their expulsion
from the country due to an absence of documents and legacy data.
“Through the helpline, we inform them about the documents they will
need to prove their citizenship. During the Assam NRC, many were
excluded owing to deficiencies in documents like spelling errors. We
tell them to ensure their papers are free of similar mistakes,” Rasheed
said. “Everyone is scared, especially the poor.”
Nishat Hussain, the founder of the National Muslim Women Welfare Society
in Jaipur, said many Muslims are apprehensive of the future and have
joined protest marches to oppose the controversial CAA/NRC. She said
many Muslims do have the basic, essential documents, such as passports
and Aadhar cards, which have unique 12-digit identification numbers for
Indian citizens. However, these might not be enough.
“In Assam, many were left out of the NRC despite having these
documents,” Hussain said. “They want decades-old documents, which are
impossible to find.”
To help Muslims, the Karnataka State Board of Auqaf,
a statutory body in southwestern India, has recently issued a circular
to mosques, citing a need to prepare family profiles of all Muslims
residing in their jurisdiction. It also calls on mosques to maintain
registers with important documents of all Muslims, including birth and
education certificates, voter ID cards, and ration cards, among others.
The circular notes: “Controversies are reported regarding the
inclusion and exclusion of names in the NRC. Recent survey conducted by
various NGOs reveal that larger section of citizens of the minority
community are deprived of the right to vote due to
non-enrolment/updation in electoral rolls of various constituencies.
Substantial number of citizens do not have the basic documents to prove
their domicile in the locality.”
A.B. Ibrahim, the then-administrator of the board, said it is
necessary for mosques to maintain a register of documents as the data of
citizens in government offices can be misplaced or destroyed due to
natural calamities and unforeseen incidents. “Many lost their documents during the Karnataka floods in August 2019,” he said.
For the Muslim citizens on the front line of the issue, however, no
preparation seems enough. Naseem Qureshi, a 24-year-old woman from
Rajasthan, said she’s afraid she’ll lose her loved ones to the CAA/NRC
exercise. “My parents tell me that we have our papers in place, but many
of my close friends and relatives don’t. What if they throw them out of
the country?” Qureshi said. “They’re looking to split families.”
Puja Changoiwala is an award-winning Indian
journalist and author. She writes about the intersections of gender,
crime, social justice, development, and human rights in India. Twitter: @cpuja
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