🇮🇳 Chaos reigns in India

The immediate cue for these events was the passage of a new law. On December 11, India’s parliament decided that persecuted minorities fleeing three nations in the neighborhood—Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan—will be fast-tracked into citizenship. The minorities were punctiliously listed: “Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians”—members of every major faith in South Asia except Muslims. The law was framed as an act of benevolence. In fact, it was an act of pointed exclusion, an explicit announcement of who belongs in India and who does not. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has never hidden its first order of business: to turn India from a secular state into a Hindu nation. In practice, that has translated into an overt loathing for 182 million Muslims, the country’s largest religious minority. This citizenship law, enshrining discrimination, gave that hatred flesh and form.

Around the world, advocates for the liberal order find ourselves in a moment when every crisis feels existential, bound either to preserve or destroy our various republics. In some cases, perhaps that is an overheated fear. Not in India. The BJP’s bigotry imperils the Indian constitution—not just the document that defines India’s soul, but the very substance of its demography. The party is daring Indians to choose what they want India to be.

During the violence, a senior federal official named Harsh Mander travelled to Gujarat and was stunned by the official negligence. Seeing that many of his colleagues were colluding in the bloodbath, he retired early from his job to work in the makeshift camps where Muslim refugees were gathering. He has dedicated much of the rest of his life to reminding the public what happened and who was responsible. “No sectarian riot ever happens in India unless the government wants it to,” Mander told me. “This was a state-sponsored massacre.”

A few officials claimed that the decision to encourage the riots came from Modi himself. Haren Pandya, a Modi rival and Cabinet minister, gave sworn testimony about the riots, and also spoke to the newsweekly Outlook. He said that, on the night the unrest began, he had attended a meeting at Modi’s bungalow, at which Modi ordered senior police officials to allow “people to vent their frustration and not come in the way of the Hindu backlash.” A police official named Sanjiv Bhatt recalled that, at another meeting that night, Modi had expressed his hope that “the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur.”

What is taking place in India is a clash between two different political visions. The Indian state is enacting an authoritarian vision in which political rights are conditioned on the privileges of religion and class and on being obedient subjects.

Mr. Modi’s government makes this clear in choosing to celebrate the upcoming 70th anniversary of the Constitution of India by focusing on “fundamental duties” of Indian citizens, which include protecting private property, abjuring from violence and striving toward excellence.

An idea borrowed from the Soviet Union, fundamental duties were inserted into the Constitution of India in 1976 by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who suspended constitutional rights, jailed opposition leaders and silenced the press between June 1975 and March 1977 — a period known in India as the Emergency.

"My father keeps spamming me on WhatsApp with fake news and videos - it's really frustrating," says Priya.

She used to hit back with links to fact-checking websites before his threats to end her education forced her to hide her political views from her parents.

Her father, she says, has no idea about her Twitter account, where she uses a handle that shields her identity.

But when the government passed the CAA, and police entered the Jamia University in Delhi, a site of one of the early protests, and attacked innocent students, then brutally beat up students at the Aligarh Muslim University, in Uttar Pradesh, it was as if a light switch had been flicked. Thousands of people, especially young people, were galvanised to take to the streets and protest, including my children. This December has brought hope where I, personally, have felt despair about the future of India. As the independent Indian news website, The Wire said: “There comes a time in a nation’s history when silence is no longer an option. When neutrality, equivocation, discretion are acts of cravenness. Where standing up, and even protesting, becomes a moral duty, because much more than the personal, or even the principle, is involved — this is an inflection point where the very soul and existence of India are at stake.”

An incredible cross section of India is not prepared to be craven. “Spaghetti straps mingled with sherwanis”, is how one report described a mixed group of modern, westernised young women rubbing shoulders with older, traditional-looking men. The posters cried: “We are not Hindus, Christians or Muslims. We are Indians”, “No silence, no violence” and “All I want for Christmas is a new government”. A young lad, who stood defiantly before a police water cannon in Delhi, said: “There is more water in my eyes than their water cannon as I cry for my country”.

The context for the Indian bill has also raised alarms. The government — which claims India is being swamped by illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh — is gearing up for a massive national exercise to assess which of India’s 1.3bn residents is eligible for citizenship.

Echoing demands once made on Rohingya, Indians are expected to have to prove their ancestors were resident in India in the first years after independence — or face the prospect of being declared illegal migrants, liable to detention and deportation.

Yet Hindus and other groups now deemed refugees by the new rules will be protected. The spectre of statelessness falls therefore mainly on Muslims.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019 on Friday, Mahathir questioned the "necessity" of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), when Indians have "lived together for 70 years".

"People are dying because of this law. Why is there a necessity to do this when all the while, for 70 years, they have lived together as citizens without any problem?" he asked.

Sanjeev Tyagi, the local police superintendent, said there was no order to open fire at the crowd and denied Anas was killed by police. He acknowledged, however, that a 20-year-old student from the locality was killed when a constable fired in self-defense.

In the same neighborhood, Mohammad Imran watched from a neighbor's terrace as a dozen police officers barged into his house. "I was so scared that I couldn't dare to do anything," he said, describing how the officers beat his 62-year-old, paralyzed father and dragged him away. "I learned yesterday that he was sent to jail."

Tyagi denied police were carrying out arbitrary arrests. The "police's job is like a surgeon, and if there is a problem, we have to do a surgery to solve the problem," he said.

If the experience of the state of Assam — where the government has carried out a limited form of this exercise — is any guide, the verification process itself will be Kafkaseque. Millions of poor people with no birth certificates or other documentary history (birth certificates only became widespread in India in the last 30 years) struggled to prove that they are citizens. The process is bureaucratic and arbitrary, leaving many to languish in camps. At the moment, 1.9 million individuals face the prospect of statelessness in Assam.

But here is the real catch. Suppose two individuals, one Hindu and one Muslim, were asked to prove their claims to citizenship. Suppose for a moment that officials determine both are in India illegally. After the enactment of the citizenship law, the Hindu will have a fast track to naturalization. It is likely that the Muslim will not.

They list a “four-step” process for India becoming a Hindu nation — starting with the new law, followed by the NRC, then another law to control population, ultimately followed by a uniform civil code that would eliminate separate civil laws for Muslims. The language employed in these posts is blatantly Islamophobic — the NRC is captioned as a “Check and Throw,” while the law for population control is captioned “No pig breeding.”

The messages justify their Islamophobia by throwing in unlikely statistics and making unverified claims. One message called Muslims a “burden” for the country, citing false statistics like the community comprises 45 patients of all patients in government hospitals (the government does not maintain such records) or that Muslims form 32 percent of all those incarcerated in India (they actually form 15 percent of all prisoners, proportionate to their population).

Sources said Delhi Police has so far created a photo dataset of over 1.5 lakh “history-sheeters” for routine crime investigation. Another dataset meant for monitoring sensitive public events has over 2000 images of terror suspects and — the latest addition — alleged “rabble-rousers and miscreants”.

The use of AFRS by police assumes significance given ongoing protests across the city against the new citizenship law and the National Register of Citizens — events where police were seen videotaping proceedings.