India’s Citizenship Amendment Act is Akin to U.S. Refugee Policy That Provides Preferential Treatment to Some Religious Groups
- While criticism of the Government of India is a valid form of political expression, it is increasingly difficult to separate this exercise of political free speech from anti-Hindu bigotry in the West.
The recent announcement by the Government of India to implement into law the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 2019 has led to a flood of highly misleading reporting in Western media regarding what the provisions and impacts of this legislation are. In their biased headlines and coverage of this law they have pounced on technicalities of how legislation is named in India (Bills are named after the section of the Indian Code of Law they modify) to slyly leave the implication in the minds of the casual reader that India has just enacted a law that somehow reduces the rights of Indian Muslims. NPR with its breathless headline of “India’s steps to impose citizenship law would exclude Muslims” and CNN with its headline of “India moves to implement controversial citizenship bill that excludes Muslims” were typical examples of such deceitful headlines.
In reality, this law will leave the citizenship rights of Indian Muslims completely unimpacted in any fashion. It is merely a law that provides humanitarian relief to persecuted religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who have fled oppression and sought refuge in India. These eligible religious minority groups are not just Hindus but also Christians, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains. Prior to the passage and implementation of the CAA such victims of discrimination who entered India without valid travel authorization were considered illegal immigrants and faced a long and arduous road toward legal status and citizenship in India.
When the CAA legislation was passed in 2019 we saw several progressive cities pass anti-CAA resolutions even though progressives have historically supported relief for refugees who are fleeing religious oppression. Many Indian American parents are also familiar with how American middle schools and high schools in some districts introduced one-sided and politically slanted educational materials for classroom discussions and debating clubs, issues that CoHNA helped tackle in 2020-2021.
Indian American parents are already well aware of how unsophisticated and skewed discussions of Indian history and contemporary Indian society in History textbooks and curricula make their children feel defensive and attacked regarding their cultural heritage. Unlike discussions of other ancient civilizations and cultures where the curriculum takes a big picture and nuanced view and is nearly always uniformly positive in what it chooses to highlight, the classroom discussion on Indian civilization is always narrowly focused on caste and narrow elements of the Hindu religion in a critical way that makes Indian American students feel uncomfortable. Misleading coverage of the CAA isn’t just of concern to a narrow community of enthusiasts of international news but feeds into a wider prevailing atmosphere rife with negative stereotypes of Hindu Americans and Indian Americans.
The Indian diaspora in the West is being rendered vulnerable to attacks by nativist extremists on both the left and the right.
American refugee policy itself provides preferential treatment to various religious minority groups in exactly the same manner as the CAA does. For example, the Lautenberg Amendment enacted into law in 1990 singled out Jews, Evangelical Christians Ukrainian Orthodox, and Ukrainian Catholics who lived in Russia or the former Soviet Union as having been victims of religious persecution in their homelands and prioritized processing of refugee applications from members of these groups. Outside of religious preferences, the U.S. also treats refugee applicants from certain Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as well as Cuba differently from other refugee applicants. Had the U.S. opened the Lautenberg Amendment to ALL Russians and former Soviet Union citizens it would have risked a massive wave of immigrants motivated by economic considerations rather than genuine religious persecution.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh have a combined population of nearly half a billion people, approximately 95% of whom are Muslims, many of whom live in relative poverty and would welcome an opportunity to immigrate to India for economic reasons. It doesn’t make any logical or moral sense to treat non-Muslim persecuted religious minorities in those countries on par with the Muslim majority that is oppressing them. Moreover, the critics of India seem to want to push forward two mutually contradictory arguments — on one hand they make sensationalistic claims that India is engaged in pogroms against its Muslim citizens and that it is a hostile place for Muslims to live and yet they are angered that a law targeted at persecuted minorities is not extended to Muslims. If India is truly such an inhospitable place for Muslims, then surely it doesn’t make sense to be miffed that Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Bangladesh can’t get an accelerated path to settle in India?
The scale of the religious discrimination faced by non-Muslim minorities in these countries can be illustrated by the simple fact that in 1951 the non-Muslim population of Pakistan and Bangladesh combined (then a unified single country) was 14% which has now dwindled to less than 6%. Afghanistan does not have reliable census statistics available but the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban and hostility to minorities is an established fact. All three countries designate Islam as the state religion and require laws to be consistent with Islam which puts non-Muslim minorities in a legally sanctioned second tier of citizenship.
In Pakistan blasphemy laws have been used to intimidate and imprison religious minorities. The abduction and forced marriage and conversion of girls from religious minorities have become common – over 1000 such cases each year by conservative estimates. Incidents of religiously motivated violence targeting the places of worship of non-Muslim minorities are also common in these countries according to the U.S. State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report.
While criticism of the Government of India is a valid form of political expression, it is increasingly difficult to separate this exercise of political free speech from anti-Hindu bigotry in the West. A Hindu majority democracy in India is being singled out repeatedly among all the nearly 200 nations on the globe and held to standards that are not imposed on any other nation. The Indian diaspora in the West is being rendered vulnerable to attacks by nativist extremists on both the left and the right. We urge Western journalists to stay away from sensationalistic and inaccurate headlines and reporting on the CAA and to present this humanitarian law in an objective light.
Saurabh Singh is a New Jersey-based volunteer with CoHNA, a grassroots-level advocacy organization representing the Hindu community of North America.