[The Citizenship Amendment Act is the latest repressive step the
Indian government has taken against the country’s Muslim minority.
By making religion a condition of citizenship, the act is devised to
transform India into a Hindutva version of Israel.]
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HINDU NATIONALISTS ARE TRANSFORMING INDIA INTO AN ISRAEL-STYLE
ETHNOSTATE  
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Abdulla Moaswes
January 8, 2020
+972 Magazine [[link removed]]

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_ The Citizenship Amendment Act is the latest repressive step the
Indian government has taken against the country’s Muslim minority.
By making religion a condition of citizenship, the act is devised to
transform India into a Hindutva version of Israel. _

Indians protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in New Delhi on
December 14, 2019. , Sanjeev Yadav/CC-BY-SA-4.0

 

In recent weeks, police in India have been cracking down on thousands
of protesters across the country. In many instances, local police are
responding with brutality and deadly violence, setting out to
inflict “maximum damage”
[[link removed]] on
demonstrators. A video
[[link removed]] uploaded
on social media shows officers in Kanpur cursing at protesters and
targeting them with live fire. Another video
[[link removed]],
from the Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi, again shows
policemen using live ammunition on protesters. Footage from the
protests at Jamia also shows female student protesters rescuing their
male colleagues from police violence.

The protests are in response to the passing of the Citizenship
Amendment Act (CAA) in December. First introduced to parliament by the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the law allows members of the Hindu,
Jain, Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, and Christian communities from Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to claim citizenship in India, while
excluding Muslims from that clause.

While BJP members have portrayed the law
[[link removed]] to
international audiences as a means of aiding minority groups from
neighboring Muslim countries escape persecution, it is in fact the
latest in a series of repressive steps the Indian government has taken
against the country’s Muslim minority. By making religion a
condition of Indian citizenship, the act has a more troubling purpose:
to transform India into a Hindutva version of Israel.

Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is the political ideology followed by
the BJP and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In pre-colonial
times, followers of the Hindu religion never thought of themselves as
a nation. As Professor Romila Thapar of Jawaharlal Nehru
University argues [[link removed]], a
national narrative of Hinduism only emerged after the writings of
early 19th century British historians of India, such as James Mill,
who wrote about a Muslim nation and a Hindu nation “perpetually
antagonistic towards each other.”

The ideological father of today’s Hindu nationalism, however, is
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. An early 20th century politician, he drew
inspiration both from Nazi Germany
[[link removed]] and from the Zionist
movement
[[link removed]] in
advocating for India to become a Hindu ethnocratic state that treated
Muslims “like negroes”
[[link removed]] in
the United States of his time.

In late November, the Indian consul-general to New York City, Sandeep
Chakravorty, cited Israeli settlements
[[link removed]] in
the occupied West Bank as an example of what India is hoping to
achieve in Kashmir. It is clear from the works of academics such
as Vivek Dehejia
[[link removed]] and Rupa
Subramanya
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this view of Israel as a model for India is not only applicable in
Kashmir — a territory under Indian military occupation for seven
decades — but also within the “mainland” and other states.

In line with their ideological affinity to Zionism, the BJP pledged
during the 2014 Indian elections to institute a policy similar to
Israel’s Law of Return, which would grant Indian citizenship to
Hindus from neighboring countries. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was
subsequently introduced to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of
parliament, in the summer of 2016.

Protests in many cities, such as Delhi, Hyderabad, and Lucknow, were
expressions of solidarity with Muslim Indians. The earliest opposition
to the bill, however, emerged in the state of Assam in 2016, where the
Assam Gana Parishad Party criticized the BJP for seeking to compromise
the identity of the indigenous Assamese people.

Although Hindus form most of Assam’s population, the question of
indigenous rights in the state is a highly sensitive legacy of British
colonial rule. It is widely known that the British promoted
the movement of Bengali settlers
[[link removed]] to
Assam, and even instituted Bengali as the official language of the
courts in 1836.

The large-scale arrival of refugees from Bangladesh during its war of
independence in 1971 led to violent pogroms by indigenous tribes
against the refugees in the later part of the decade. Indigenous
residents of other states in northeast India protested for similar
reasons, most notably in Tripura.

AN ESCALATION TOWARD SETTLER-COLONIALISM

India has always had a problematic relationship with the religious and
ethnic minorities it has ruled over, who make up about 15 percent of
the population — and with its Muslim minority in particular. But the
BJP’s _de jure_ creation of tiered citizenship between Muslims and
non-Muslims represents an alarming embrace of ethnocracy and
apartheid.

Just as the repeal of Article 370
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August allows India to shrink Kashmir’s Muslim majority, the CAA is
designed to facilitate a similar demographic change and diminish
India’s Muslim population. This law is particularly dangerous when
used alongside India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is
the official record of India’s citizens as per the 1955 Citizenship
Act. The register has not been updated in the vast majority of the
country since the 1950s, yet Indian Home Minister Amit Shah declared
in 2019 that it will be used to expel “each and every infiltrator
in India.” [[link removed]]

To make it onto the NRC, Indians will have to demonstrate possession
of documents that prove their legal status prior to a cut-off date:
March 24, 1971 in the case of Assam, for example. This poses an
enormous problem to people who perhaps have not been able to hold onto
such documents over the years.

In Assam, almost 2 million residents have not been able to make it
onto the NRC, including about 700,000 Muslims. Although non-Muslims
will be rendered stateless for a short period, the CAA will allow them
to regain citizenship. Muslims, on the other hand, are excluded from
this safeguard and may be forced to reside in detention centers.

The practical consequences of India’s NRC bear many similarities to
Israel’s control of the population registry of the occupied West
Bank and Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority may update its own
copy of the citizenship registry, it is Israel that determines the
status of Palestinians [[link removed]],
including whether to recognize their legal documents or to decide the
extent that they can freely move in and out of the occupied
territories.

According to Israeli human rights non-profit B’Tselem, Israel has
not updated the Palestinian population registry since 2000. The group
also states that the reasons for Palestinians losing or not gaining
official status by Israel include prolonged time spent abroad and
absence from population censuses, among others.

In this context, Israel uses the Palestinian population registry to
manipulate and engineer demographics in a way that suits Israeli
settler-colonial ambitions. This is further supplemented by the
arbitrary incarceration and detention of Palestinians as a form of
population control.

The Indian state has employed oppressive structures and processes,
ranging from state-sponsored massacres to full-blown military
occupation, for virtually its entire history. However, the repeal of
Article 370 and the adoption of the CAA are an escalation toward
settler-colonial ambitions. It attempts to erase the association
between indigenous peoples and their lands, while creating an
association between non-indigenous settlers and those same lands.

It is no coincidence that these changes are occurring under the rule
of Hindu nationalists and the most Israel-friendly administration in
India’s history. As with Savarkar almost a century ago, the fascist
dreams of Modi and other Hindu nationalists today remain inspired by
the actions of Zionists.

[_Abdulla Moaswes is a Palestinian lecturer in media studies and the
social sciences. He is a graduate of the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS) and the University of Exeter and his research
focuses on transregional linkages between the Middle East and South
Asia. Follow him on Twitter @KarakMufti_.]

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