The Wall Street Journal says that millions of Muslims in India will end up in detention centers and the unknown future, as a result of the application of a controversial nationality law that is expected to enter India in security tensions that are unparalleled.
A newspaper report makes clear that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist Party, Bharatiya Janata, have been interpreting the Indian constitution as calling for the surrender of India’s religious minorities - such as about 14% of the 1.3 billion people in the country’s Muslim population - to the Hindu majority, and that they see their party’s agenda It should focus on correcting what they believe are historical mistakes imposed on Hindus, a strategy that may enable them to win elections for decades to come.
About two million from one state
The report pointed out that the northeastern Indian state of Assam, which borders Bangladesh, is the first state in the country (out of 28 states) to implement the Nationality Law, and its application last August resulted in the exclusion of about 1.9 million people from the national registry of nationality, commenting that this process She was accompanied by clear and wide human errors.
He added that those who are excluded will be subjected to ill-treatment and worse, and he also said that proving nationality in India is not easy, as anyone must provide documents belonging to a series of former ancestors.
Assam state police arrest protesters against controversial nationality law (Reuters) |
The chief researcher at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, Niranjan Sahu, who has written extensively on political polarization, said that if a margin of error is applied in the registration process, it will result in stripping at least 65 million people of their nationality, a figure that exceeds the total population of Italy, adding This process will lead to more polarization within society and the political scene.
India is on the way to Myanmar
India is not alone in managing the naturalization process to move away from the merger and turn it into an instrument for exclusion, said Christopher Spireveldt, senior researcher at the Peter Macmullen Center for "No-Nation" at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Spireveldt warned that what started with the state of Assam and now extends to other states, is a major threat to the citizenship that was described as the basic right.
The Wall Street Journal drew attention to the intensity of Modi and his government receiving tacit international support by US President Donald Trump's visit to India yesterday, and his refusal to discuss the Indian Nationality Act despite the bloody protests that shook the Indian capital a few kilometers from where the two leaders met, referring to Trump who told reporters that they had spoken On religious freedom, but when journalists pressed him more he answered that he wanted to leave this matter to India itself.