The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, is a law passed by the Indian Parliament in 2019. It aims to amend the country’s citizenship laws, defines illegal immigrants and lays down the rules and prerequisites for applying for Indian citizenship. It allows minorities of six communities, namely Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians, from India’s neighboring countries — Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Bangladesh — who entered India before 31 December 2014 to get citizenship more easily on the grounds of religious persecution.
The introduction of this bill led to mass protests from students, civil society, and the opposition parties as religion for the first time was made a test of Indian citizenship. The most notable was a 100-plus day protest in Shaheen Bagh, a working-class Muslim neighbourhood in the country’s capital, New Delhi with Muslim women at the forefront of this protest.
Four years after the CAA’s initial introduction and passing, the rules were brought into effect in March 2024.
If there is Islamophobia, it is because once they cross a certain percentage of the population, they begin to assert themselves disproportionately. It happened in Lebanon. Everyone knows what ISIS/Daesh did in Iraq and Syria. That is why Myanmar tried to pre-empt such an situation .
Maybe Muslims and the likes of Arundhati Roy should ask themselves: why is it that other minorities – Parsis, for example, are not victims of such a ‘phobia’??
Islamophobia is not entirely without reason. There is the recent incident of former Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) students’ union president, Faizul Hasan, saying, “Muslims can destroy anything if they wish to do and the community has constantly been tested since 1947.” Since he refused to withdraw his statement, a case of sedition was lodged against him.
Then there’s the appeal of former ex-JNU student member and Shaheen Bagh Coordination committee chief Sharjeel Imam’s instructing Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh to ‘cut off Assam from India’ (chakka jaam) by blocking by blocking roads railways. It must be noted that AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi condemned it.
T.J. Joseph, a professor of Malayalam at Newman College in Kerala had his hand cut off at the wrist as punishment on allegation of blasphemy, by people belonging to Popular Front of India, a confederation of fanatic, Muslim fundamentalist and extremist organisations. An NIA court in Kochi found 13 people guilty in the sensational case.
Muslim rioters even desecrated the Amar Jawan Jyoti memorial – a war memorial dedicated to the fighters of the First Indian Freedom Struggle, 1857.
The Muslims had assembled at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan on August 11, 2012 to condemn the Rakhine riots in Myanmar, themselves rioting. The riot resulted in two deaths and injuries to 63 people including 58 police officers. Mumbai Police estimated that the riots caused a loss of ₹2.74 crore in damages to public and private property.
Similar situation in Feb. 1989 by over 2,000 Muslims protesting the book ‘Satanic Verses’ by Salman Rushdie. Mumbai Police were forced to open fire, which resulted in the death of 10 protesters being and 50 being wounded.
Then there’s ‘love jihad’.