INDIA Citizenship Amendment Act protests live updates: Death toll in UP rises to 15

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Protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act continued in some parts of the country while the situation has improved in states like West Bengal, Assam and Meghalaya. Stay with TOI for latest updates.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...g/72910721.cms

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Snip from yahoo.

What is the Citizenship Amendment Act?

Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) says the Citizenship Amendment Act will make it easier for “persecuted minorities” from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to claim Indian citizenship.


But it specifies that to be eligible for expedited citizenship one must be Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Christian or Buddhist. In a statement, Amnesty India said the Act “legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion and stands in clear violation of the Constitution of India and international human rights law… while inclusionary in its stated objective, [the Act] is exclusionary in its structure and intent.”


The move has provoked heightened anxiety among India’s 200 million Muslims because of its relation to another BJP plan: making a list of all the legal citizens of India. Modi’s Home Minister Amit Shah says the so-called National Register of Citizens will root out “infiltrators” from India — a term many Muslims see as a dog-whistle for themselves.


A trial run of the NRC was completed in the northeastern state of Assam earlier this year. The state’s 33 million residents were asked to prove they had been residents of India since at least 1971, and 1.9 million were left off the list in August, when they could not. (Many people who have lived in Assam for generations were left off the list, for example because of misspelled names on official documents or because they were forced to flee their homes, leaving papers behind.) The government began constructing detention camps to hold those who fail to prove their citizenship at an appeal. But to the dismay of local BJP politicians, when statistics emerged about those left off the list, it turned out that a substantial proportion were Hindus, not Muslims.


Shah has repeatedly said he wants to roll out the NRC across the rest of India at an unspecified time in the near future.
And many protesters and advocacy groups fear the Citizenship Amendment Act is a way for Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to guarantee expedited Indian citizenship for Hindus left off a future nationwide list of citizens, while denying that citizenship to Muslims who cannot prove they are Indian. In a statement released by her publisher, Arundhati Roy, one of India’s most famous writers, compared the Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC to the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which blocked Jews from German citizenship.


“The Act definitely cannot be seen in isolation,” says Erum, of Amnesty India. “The fact that it will precede the NRC across India has to be taken into consideration. The Act essentially weaponizes the NRC against Muslims.”


Farhat Ali Khan, a student protester studying literature at Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi, tells TIME that he believes a potential India-wide NRC program, the kind the BJP wants to implement, would end up being blatantly anti-Muslim. He thinks a Hindu without documents would likely be allowed to stay, while a Muslim could eventually end up in a detention camp. “What is bothering the Jamia students is these damn camps,” Khan says. “This generation has never thought India would come to this day and that’s why we’re protesting.”


“I’m shivering when I talk about this.”

https://news.yahoo.com/not-just-musl...171135086.html