‘Liberal-Seculars’
Opposition to CAA Based only on Hypocrisy & Falsehood
By Amba Charan
Vashishth
In a parliamentary democracy as we
have in India, every enactment or an amendment to the existing Act of
parliament has to be tabled in the two houses of parliament, must be discussed,
after discussion put to vote of the house and passed by majority.
In the matter of the recent amendment
to the Citizens’ Act 1955 this procedure was duly followed. After full
discussion the opposition stressed on a division and the amendment was carried
with a comfortable majority — 311 in favour and 80 against
in Lok Sabha and 125 for and 105 against
in Rajya Sabha. After the President of
India gave his assent the Bill became the Citizens Amendment Act (CAA).
What else could be the democratic process? How could then a section of the
opposition allege that democracy in the country has been/is being throttled? Opponents
fail to enlighten the countrymen as to what way should have been adopted to get
a law, like the CAA, through in a ‘democratic’ way? The procedure adopted by the
present NDA government to get an enactment through in Parliament or state
assembly is exactly the same as had been adopted by any Congress or
non-Congress government in the past.
The people have not forgotten how did
the then Congress-led UPA government of Dr. Manmohan Singh go to the extent
of ‘purchasing’ support of other groups to
sail through the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Deal because it did not command adequate numbers on its own
strength. And yet that was perfectly ‘democratic’!
It is no democracy when those parties
and leaders rejected by the people claim to be the custodians of peoples’
interests. It is a display of arrogance and autocracy by these self-righteous
self-acclaimed ‘democratic’ leaders who cannot digest what the NDA government
has gone so swiftly to fulfill the promises it made to the people during the
general elections to Parliament held in May 2019.
And the parties and individuals
opposed to NDA and others who supported CAA in Parliament are trying to undo
this law passed by the two houses of Parliament by indulging in violence and
arson resulting in loss of innocent lives and destruction of public and private
property. They seem to be trying to kill parliamentary democracy through
mobocracy.
As already made clear by both PM Narendra Modi
and Home Minister Amit Shah, there is no provision in the new amended law that
any person belonging to any minority and majority group can be deprived of
his/her citizenship. In fact, CAA has
been enacted only to provide citizenship to Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Parsi and
Buddhist minority which has been forced to leave Pakistan, Bangladesh, or
Afghanistan. Everybody knows that these minority groups are harassed, tortured
and forcibly converted to Islam in these countries. Even the UN Human Rights
Organisation has condemned these countries for human rights violation and
torture of minorities in these countries.
To make Partition of India creating Pakistan in
1947 (and, later, secession of East Pakistan from West Pakistan to give birth
to Bangladesh) look ‘secular’ can be
nothing else but an act of
self-befooling; it was a cent-percent division of India on communal lines.
Besides other tragedies, it also goes to the lack of vision of the then
Congress leadership which made no effort to evolve an agency to safeguard the
interests of the minorities in the countries that separated from India. In
1950, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the then Pakistan premier Liaqat
Ali Khan did sign an India-Pakistan agreement to safeguard the interests of the
minorities in the two countries.
While India did honestly implement the agreement,
for Pakistan it remained just a piece of paper worth throwing into a dustbin.
Facts speak for themselves.
In 2001-11 decade India’s population rose by 18
percent while that of Muslims went up by 24 percent. Accordingly, the
percentage of Muslim population jumped to 14.3 percent from 13.4 while that of Hindus
went down from 84.1 to 80.5 percent.
On
the other hand, the Hindu population in Pakistan which was 12.9 percent in 1947
fell to a meager of 1.6 percent now. In Bangladesh Hindu population according
to 1951 census was 22.05 percent. It has been made to melt down to 8.5 percent.
These facts hold a mirror to the reality
how far are the minorities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh being treated. Can Pakistan or Afghanistan’s minorities hold
protests the way a minority of India’s Muslims is doing in India? In these two
countries even when Hindu population is being persecuted, yet no minority of
Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis are accused of any terrorist activity.
People are
being instigated against the amended law on unfounded and imaginary grounds
that Muslims from these countries had been excluded from being eligible to get
Indian citizenship. It would be a rank hypocrisy — and
to a great extent laughable and foolish too — to
assume that Muslims in these Islamist countries are a ‘persecuted’ lot. To
think of Muslim ‘persecution’ in these Islamist
countries would be as much a stupidity as to presume that Christians in
countries like Vatican City, Rome, Great Britain and USA could have been
persecuted so much persecuted on account
of their faith forcing them to quit their mother/fatherland to seek citizenship
in other countries. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has rightly said: India cannot
be turned into a dharmshaala for giving citizenship to persons from every
country in the world.
That is the reason why the Muslim
community from these countries was excluded in CAA. Including majority
community from these countries for citizenship would only have resulted in
welcoming export of terrorist elements in the garb of their ‘persecution’.
People are also being misled on imaginary
provisions in the CAA to deprive India’s Muslim citizens of their citizenship
and to throw them out of the country. The PM and Home Minister have challenged
the leaders opposing the Act to show where at all there is a provision to
cancel the citizenship of any Indian, not to speak of Muslim citizens of India.
They have yet to accept the challenge.
In 1971 10 million refugees from the then East
Pakistan (now Bangladesh) entered India. Why were they not given citizenship by
the then ‘secular’ Congress government of Smt. Indira Gandhi?
Moreover, the anti-CAA elements must understand
that there are about 50 Islamist countries in the world and India is the only
one Hindu majority but secular country. If not India, where else can — and
should — the Hindu citizens go if they are persecuted on account of their faith
in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan?
It is a
pity — and,
to a great extent, hypocrisy — that Congress and
other self-proclaimed ‘secular’ parties are now shedding tears on imaginary
fears alleging ‘injustice’ to Muslim minority. Earlier, they had been
supporting Articles 370 and 35A and now opposing when these have been scrapped.
These very ‘secular’ parties had, in effect, been instrumental in allowing
persistence of the worst kind of injustice to minorities and dalits in J&K
because of these very articles. Successive J&K governments had during the
past 72 years refused to grant citizenship to people who had migrated to the
State at the time of Partition in 1947. More than 50,000 scavengers had been
brought to the valley for serving the people of the State but they were neither
granted citizenship nor allowed to do any other service. J&K women who
married persons from other States were deprived of their rights in the State.
The government had also denied rights to dalits and backward classes. Human rights,
scheduled caste/scheduled tribes and backward classes commission had not been
constituted in the State. Yet these ‘secular’ parties remained instrumental and
silent on continuance of this injustice to the people. Why? They would not
explain. ***
The
writer is a Delhi-based political analyst and commentator.
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