WASHINGTON: India’s new citizenship law aims to marginalise Muslims and turn India into a homeland for Hindus, says a New York Times editorial published on Thursday.

The editorial also condemns India’s Aug 5 decision to illegally merge Kashmir with the union and to turn nearly two million Muslims in Assam into a stateless crowd.

“The law, as India’s 200 million Muslims have correctly surmised, has nothing to do with helping migrants and everything to do with the campaign by Mr Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah, to marginalise Muslims and turn India into a homeland for Hindus, who comprise about 80 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion,” the newspaper wrote.

It noted that last summer, the Modi government “abruptly stripped statehood and autonomy from India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, arresting many of its leaders and shutting down the internet.”

Also in August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “aggressively escalated a program of citizenship tests in the northeastern state of Assam, leaving nearly two million people, many of them Muslims, potentially stateless,” NYT added.

The newspaper noted that Mr Modi has vowed to extend the process, “which requires Indians to prove they’re Indian, to the entire country and is building large new detention centers for those who can’t”.

The newspaper noted that the new law offers accelerated citizenship to members of the Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee and Jain religions — but not to Muslims. And the only neighbouring countries named in the law are Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, all majority Muslim.

“The not-so-hidden message is that … Muslims from such countries cannot be refugees — even people like the Rohingya, some of whom have reached India after fleeing to Bangladesh from brutal repression in Myanmar,” NYT added.

The newspaper also noted that Mr Shah “has taken to demonizing the primary target of the dragnets, Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, whom he refers to as termites”.

Noting that the citizenship law has provoked furious protests across India, the newspaper adds: “The government has also shut down the internet in several regions, a tactic against dissent used by India more than any other authoritarian-leaning government in the world, claiming it is necessary to prevent violence and false rumors.”

“Kashmir has been offline since August, and India is by far the world’s leader in the number of internet shutdowns.”

The newspaper notes that since he took office in 2014, Mr Modi has actively worked to change India, “even rewriting history books to exclude Muslim rulers — who, among other things, built the Taj Mahal — and changing official place names to Hindu from Muslim. Hindu mobs that lynch Muslims are rarely punished.”

NYT points out that some non-Muslim Indian liberals, including members of the once-dominant Congress Party, have joined in the protests against the law, which has also drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups and governments.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2019