New HRW report urges repeal of India’s citizenship law; says it incited anti-Muslim violence

Human Rights Watch has published a new report, detailing how New Delhi’s Citizenship Amendment Act provoked anti-Muslim violence, and urges India to repeal the discriminatory measure.

The 82-page report entitled ‘Shoot the Traitors’: Discrimination Against Muslims Under India’s New Citizenship Policy”,  also calls for doing away with a planned national citizenship registry.

The two moves can threaten the citizenship rights of millions of Indian Muslims, the Watch, a global organization, says in the report.

The report notes that the police and other officials have repeatedly failed to intervene when government supporters attacked those protesting the new citizenship policies. The police, however, have been quick to arrest critics of the policy and disperse their peaceful demonstrations, including by using excessive and lethal force.

“India’s prime minister (Narendra Modi) has appealed for a united fight against COVID-19, but has yet to call for unity in the fight against anti-Muslim violence and discrimination,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Thursday.

“Government policies have opened the door for mob violence and police inaction that have instilled fear among Muslims and other minority communities throughout the country,” she says.

The report is based on more than 100 interviews with victims of abuse and their families from Delhi and the states of Assam and Uttar Pradesh, as well as with legal experts, academics, activists, and police officials.

The new amended citizenship law fast-tracks asylum claims of irregular immigrants from the neighbouring Muslim-majority countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but excludes Muslims. It was enacted amid the BJP government’s push for a nationwide citizenship verification process, through a National Population Register (NPR) and a National Register of Citizens (NRC), aimed at screening out “illegal migrants.”

While work on the population register has been deferred to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Human Rights Watch said statements from the Indian home minister Amit Shah and other BJP leaders have raised fears that millions of Indian Muslims, including many whose families have lived in the country for generations, could be stripped of their citizenship rights and disenfranchised.

The United Nations and a number of governments have publicly criticized the citizenship law as discriminatory on the basis of religion, HRW pointed out. But BJP officials have mocked and threatened protesters, while some of their supporters have engaged in mob attacks on critics and anti-government protesters.

It highlighted the fact that some BJP leaders called for the protesters, whom they described as “traitors,” to be shot.

In February 2020 in Delhi, it recalled, communal clashes and Hindu mob attacks on Muslims resulted in more than 50 deaths. Witness accounts and video evidence show police complicity in the violence. In one incident, police officers beat a group of five Muslim men injured in the mob attacks, taunting them, and ordered them to sing the national anthem as a form of humiliation. One of these men later died.

At least 30 people, mostly Muslims, were killed during protests in BJP-governed states, particularly in Uttar Pradesh. During other protests, including by students, the police failed to intervene when government supporters attacked protesters.

“The police were present in the campus when the violence broke out,” said a student at a university in Delhi who was injured when a pro-BJP group attacked protesting students, was quoted as saying in the report. “We sought help from them and then we ran to flee the attackers, but the police never came to our aid.”

The National Register of Citizens has already left nearly two million people at risk of arbitrary detention and statelessness in India’s northeast state of Assam. In August 2019, Assam became the first state to complete the register.

Human Rights Watch said it found that the process in Assam lacked standardization, leading to arbitrary and discriminatory decisions by officials, and put undue hardship on poorer residents who do not have access to identity documentation – dating back for decades – to establish citizenship claims. Women, who are more likely than men to lack access to documentation, were disproportionately affected. The process in Assam has heightened fears over a nationwide citizenship registry, the report says.