India’s government has pushed through a dangerous new bill that has provoked a mass uprising. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) offers a fast-track to legalization for Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Buddhist and Jain immigrants from bordering nations while explicitly denying one religious group the same privileges. For years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been chipping away at the rights of Muslims in India, but the world’s largest democracy may have finally overplayed its hand on the deepest question in any country: who belongs and who does not.
Before the passage of the CAA, the BJP tested an equally ominous policy in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, which shares lengthy borders with numerous nations, including Myanmar and Bangladesh. The National Register of Citizens (NRC), mandated by a law passed years earlier, was implemented in Assam and required Indians to prove their ancestry with hard documentation in order to be considered citizens—a mean feat in a poor state with high levels of illiteracy.
— source truthdig.com | Dec 27, 2019