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.
You are Congress run news portal. Not surprisingly u are with anti nationals
In view, the failure on the economic front will haunt the nation more than the unwarranted political controversies created by the Modi government in its second term. In the first term, the Modi government was blessed by the phenomenon of steep decline in oil prices. This was an unexpected bonanza that hid Modi’s failure to bring in major economic reforms. Demonetisation was not a reform by any stretch of imagination. Yes, GST, IBR , i.e. resolution of corporate loans through NCLT route were two major reforms. But these were inherited by the Modi regime and were not his own invention. Land reforms were thought of but quickly discarded, after criticism of ‘Suit Boot ki Sarkar’. Modi simply relied on populist slogans and seemed to have succumbed to the mistaken belief that the economy will run on autopilot without any policy intervention. The failure to bring in any major structural reform is hurting the economy as GDP growth rate has slumped to 5% and all the drivers of growth appear to be exhausted.
Paradoxically, despite this major failure on the economic front, Modi retained his popularity and came back with thumping majority- a somewhat surprising verdict for all, including the ruling party, which seems have got totally carried away by this unexpected electoral bonanza. The government has thereafter initiated disruptive majoritarian measures one after another in great haste, without thinking of the long term consequences. The BJP is, therefore, on the verge of wasting the historic mandate and has suffered consequent electoral reverses in state elections.
Again in my view, this is not the time to play the blame game as the country faces its worst economic crisis. The present government still has more than four years to go. I would urge the PM to make suitable amends and focus entirely on improving our economy. In the words of D.Subbarao, ex-Governor, RBI: “ Should I have the opportunity, I will tell the PM, ‘It’s the economy,Sir’. What Prime Minister Modi should do, in my view, is to wholeheartedly embrace responsibility for for reviving the economy. He should make an unequivocal statement that repairing the economy, putting it track to a five trillion output as quickly as possible, will be his single-point agenda and will receive his undivided attention, to the exclusion of all other social and political concerns. To be credible on that, he should back up that statement with an action plan and roadmap with clear milestones and measurable outcomes”
Best luck to our Prime Minister.
None of the old formulas work. Anti-Modism. Caste arithmetic. The slogan of secularism. Modi has transcended all these binaries. Modi is now both the message and the messenger. Washington Post
Modi may be all this stuff, but Shah is not. And now it is Shahenshah who has the power. Shah is using Modi as his “clean” face.
So, relative freedom, which the Indian media enjoyed in the pre-Modi period, was not used to benefit the Indian people but largely to harm them. Why then is the media (and the so-called “intellectuals”) lamenting over the suppression of media freedom? Even before it came to power, media freedom was being used in a manner detrimental to the people’s welfare. It is time now to stop treating media freedom as a shibboleth and an idee fixe. It is only a means to an end, and not a sacrosanct end in itself. The so-called “liberals”, “intellectuals” and champions of media freedom should develop some depth in their thinking. And if the Indian media wants to be respected, it must act like the European media when it was fighting against feudalism. Only then does its freedom deserve to be supported and only then will the people respect it.
This religious polarisation follows a simple logic. Hindus make up 80 percent of India’s electorate, and if they can be persuaded to set aside their multiple other identities—caste, class, region, food, language—and vote as Hindus alone, then a party can stay in power for as long as it likes. Foreign policy magazine