On the 4th of December 2019 the Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP)-led government of India introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in parliament. By the 11th of December the bill had been enacted into law after being pushed through parliamentary votes, and signed by the President. The rules of the law are still being written and yet Home Minister Amit Shah announced on the 10th of January 2020 that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is now in operation. By doing so, the BJP has chosen to ignore thousands of citizens who have been gathering on the streets to protest against the Act since the 4th of December, and who continue to do so in defiance of state and police violence across the country.
The protests have been fuelled by the controversial tenets of the act which effectively deny citizenship to Muslims, as well as the knowledge that this is part of a much longer agenda of the BJP to deepen state surveillance and turn India into a Hindu theocracy, or what some call a ‘Hindu Rashtra.’ The Act is complex as it cannot be seen as a stand-alone piece of legislation and the affects on people will be different depending on the state, due to historic migration patterns and the diversity of ethnicities across the country. Nevertheless, three core elements can be seen to directly compromise the democratic and secular Constitution of India, and have been the spark and fuel for protests across the country.
Firstly, the Act directly contradicts the fundamental rights of the Constitution, specifically Article 14 and Article 21. Article 14 guarantees “Equality before the law”, and Article 21 the “Right to Life”.
