In a hurried cab ride from Peddar Road to Bhaudaji Lad Museum in Byculla, albeit before the lockdown, I asked the taxi driver to take me via N.M. Joshi road as I plotted the journey on google maps. He turns around, bewildered and asks, “What’s that?” Equally confused I provided a landmark, to which he responded, “You mean Delisle Road?” Shaking his head in disapproval at my ignorance at Bombay’s street names, he speeds on. Streets across the city have old and new names, from Falkland road being renamed PB Marg despite its role in Manto’s Bombay Stories, to Lamington Road, renowned for its electronics, being renamed to Dr A Nair road, with locals usually knowing the former name, not the latter.

Mumbai, India’s financial hub, a bustling megapolis of 20 million people is best known for its traffic, Bollywood, and businesses. To the average Mumbaikar, or Bombaywallah, depending on your taste, it is better known for its complicated street names, which confuse families that have been there for generations and newly arriving migrants. Under the Shiv Sena, a regional Hindu nationalist party, the city of Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1996. Mumbai was the original name of the city some 1000 years ago, before it became a trading hub.

While the move against colonial rule is justified as a way to overcome the horrors the country faced under the British Raj, in recent years, this renaming trend has moved past British rule. The ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), has renamed sites and cities built by the Mughals, a Muslim dynasty that ruled India between the 16th and 18th centuries. Recently in Delhi, Aurangzeb Road, was renamed Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Marg, after a Muslim President of India, since Aurangzeb is considered anti-Hindu, while Dr Kalam is considered what some on the right call a “good Muslim,” as if Muslims have to prove their loyalty to the nation. The city of Allahabad was renamed Prayagraj, its original Sanskrit name, five-hundred years later. A local BJP politician remarked that the renaming of Allahabad was a way to “rectify the mistake made by Akbar,” arguing that the Mughal ruler eroded the city’s ancient traditions, while ignoring the contributions Akbar made to the country. 

The typical justification for this anti-Muslim stance is that the Mughals were invaders who destroyed the glory of Hindu civilisation, while disregarding the centuries-long influence the dynasty had in shaping Indian culture. The secular and unifying foundations of Indian nationalism devised India’s founding fathers during and after the freedom struggle, are disregarded by the current government in favour of a Hindu nationalist vision of the country.

These small steps, in conjunction with more concerning actions such as the abolition of Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, the passage of the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and recent Delhi riots, seek to marginalise Muslims and undermine their contributions to the country, has prejudiced a country against 182 million people. Criticisms of the government result in online abuse from the BJP’s troll army, as faced by Rana Ayub, and sadly, in more extreme cases, the murder of Gauri Lankesh. Charges are filed against those who express their dissent against the government. The renaming efforts to the BJP now, and the Shiv Sena 23 years ago, are justified as a matter of national pride. Instead, they have prejudiced the nation against the millions of religious and ethnic groups that contribute to the country’s uniqueness. 

Contact Vibhav Mariwala at vibhavmariwala ‘at’ gmail.com. 

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A recent article in The Stanford Review titled “Why Stanford protestors are wrong about India’s citizenship bill” argued that the premise of the recent Stanford protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was faulty and informed by false information. I’d like to argue that this article lacked historical context and analysis in explaining the dangers of this act.

As a student of Indian history pursuing a thesis on the creation of the modern Indian state, I was disappointed by the arguments made, mainly because they propagate the same false narratives espoused by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its supporters in India. The argument forwarded by the Review article lacked historical depth.

The only point I agree with the article on is that the CAA needs to be viewed in its historical context. However, the author of the article possesses an incomplete and poorly researched idea of how modern India was formed. Moreover, the CAA must be analysed through the lens of the BJP’s policy of Hindutva, which essentially advocates the creation of a Hindu state in which religious and ethnic minorities are not considered equal citizens.

The CAA provides fast-track citizenship to select minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan but fails to specify a pathway to citizenship for Muslim minorities from the same countries. In essence, it allows Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians an expedited Indian citizenship process. The government claimed that the CAA would be used to help those fleeing religious persecution. However, the Act does not mention persecution at all. 

There were several opportunities for legislators to craft a more inclusive bill. In December, as I stayed up late to watch debates on the bill in Parliament, several amendments were proposed, including one which would have allowed all religious minorities, including Muslims, to be covered by the Act. This proposed amendment failed. Additionally, there was an amendment proposed to include minorities from other countries including Sri Lanka, where thousands of Hindu Tamils fled the Sri Lankan War to India, Bhutan and Nepal, but that also failed. So here is a question I pose to any supporters of the CAA: What is the problem with including Muslims in a bill that is meant to help minorities?

The Review article reads, “Most importantly, the CAA does not affect existing Indian citizens. Anti-CAA propaganda at Stanford has painted an apocalyptic picture of an India in which Muslims are relegated to second-tier status. This mischaracterizes the bill. The CAA does absolutely nothing to curtail the rights of any existing Indian citizen, Muslim or otherwise.”

The writer has failed to even mention the creation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and how that process is discriminatory and undermines the rights of Indian citizens. The NRC officially instituted a state-wide register of citizens in the Indian state of Assam following the 1951 Census of India. It was created in response to large-scale migration to Assam after the Partition of India and Pakistan (and present-day Bangladesh) in 1947. This migration disrupted relations between the Assamese, Muslims and Bengali Hindus. The aim of the 1951 NRC was to compile a list of legal citizens in the state and remove illegal immigrants from Bangladesh given the state’s ethnic and religious factions. Contrary to fundamental democratic principles, the burden of proof fell on individuals to prove their citizenship, rather than the state to disprove their claims to citizenship. The NRC was carried out at significant costs and left out 1.9 million individuals from the registrar, many of whom are Hindus. The process has proven to be extremely burdensome to the people of Assam, with many committing suicide because of the prospect of being locked up in detention camps or spending their savings in legal fees. 

The CAA will allow disenfranchised Hindus under the NRC to regain their citizenship, while leaving Muslims at a disadvantage. One of the many reasons for the recent uproar in India over the Act is that many Muslims view it as a direct threat to their citizenship. How? The Act disenfranchises millions under the tedious NRC process, in which citizens are expected to provide papers that prove their ancestors entered the country before a particular date, which most poor and illiterate Indians do not possess. However, unlike disenfranchised Hindus and non-Muslim minorities, Muslims will be left in bureaucratic limbo and might not be able to get their citizenship back under this law, while Hindus and other religious groups will be granted expedited citizenship. To the writer’s point about Muslims being able to apply for citizenship through other means: this does not negate the fact that the priority that the CAA gives non-Muslims still makes it discriminatory. 

The writer also mentions that the CAA does not undermine Indian secularism. However, it undermines fundamental components of the Indian constitution, whether it is Article 14, the equality clause or its secular preamble. Moreover, the Act undermines the intentions of the founding fathers, which was to create a state that upholds rights equally, to all its citizens. When citizenship was debated in the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947, Sardar Patel, then Home Minister, made his intention of making citizenship a non-issue clear.

Patel said, “There are two ideas about nationality in the modern world, one is broad-based nationally and the other is narrow nationality. Now, in South Africa we claim for Indians born there South African nationality [referencing the Apartheid regime]. It is not right for us to take a narrow view.”

The CAA propounds a narrow view of citizenship that Patel himself was against. Making religion a basis under which some individuals are prioritized over others contradicts the view expressed above. While I agree that minorities in Pakistan and other countries have been persecuted by the state, why not broaden the parameters of citizenship? Why limit it only to religion and not other factors? 

Another broad generalisation many other pro-CAA supporters make is that because Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Islamic states, Muslims cannot be persecuted there. This analysis is flawed and can be refuted by a simple Google search. It assumes Islam is a coherent, homogenous religion. It is not. Indian Muslims have lived on the subcontinent for centuries and have become a constituent part of Indian culture. Just think Bollywood music, chicken tikka, Mughlai food and Indian clothes. Shia and Sunni Islam and very different in their practices, and these broad categories include further sub-divisions. Saudi Arabia and Iran are both Muslim states, but they are still opposed to each other because Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-majority state, while Iran is a Shia-majority state. Some Muslims are discriminated by others in these “Muslim states”; the CAA washes over these important distinctions within Islam. The writer of the Review article mentions that India recognizes Ahmadis as Muslims. However, they are unable to sit on the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which is the body recognized as the representatives of Indian Muslims by the government. Moreover, Pakistan declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims in 1974, so by definition, they should be recognized as minorities (which the CAA does not). 

Finally, the Review article fails to make mention of the nationalist ideology of the BJP and its anti-Muslim ideals. Since Modi took office in 2014, hate crimes against Muslims have increased exponentially, and after his re-election in 2019, his government has exacerbated its anti-Muslim actions. On Aug. 5, his government stripped the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and demoted it to a Union Territory controlled by the Central Government. The BJP-led central government also imposed an internet blackout when it stripped the state of its autonomy, suppressing all forms of dissent in the state. The blackout has persisted for longer than 150 days, making it the longest that a democratic region has seen. In protests against the CAA in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest and most populous state, Muslim homes have been targeted by the police, while militant Hindu groups have been able to roam scot-free. Are these actions taken by the state not discriminatory?

I would suggest that the Review writer, along with other CAA supporters, take a class or two in source analysis and read some seminal works on the modern Indian state. Some of these include “The Indian Constitution: A Cornerstone of the Nation” (it has chapter-wise breakdowns of fundamental rights and other provisions) and “The Discovery of India” (specifically the last two chapters), two works that explain the political and social context under which India was founded. It would be worth also reading AG Noorani’s anthology “The Muslims of India: A Documentary Record” to understand how the differential interests of minorities were reconciled in the country (it is also a treasure trove of primary sources!). India’s founders strove to avoid incorporating religion into the state’s activities to ensure that all Indians, regardless of their cultural, religious or ethnic backgrounds were allowed to participate in the experiment of Indian democracy. Finally, I would recommend reading the section on Fundamental Rights in the Constitution of India itself. It is an expression of what India ought to be and the work that needs to be done to make it a truly sovereign, secular, democratic republic.

If you are a student interested in learning more about South Asia, I would recommend taking HISTORY 296E: “Modern South Asia,” HISTORY 296C: “The Making of Modern India,” HISTORY 297D: “Oral History and the Partition of India” and HISTORY 297G: “Rulers, Reformers, Radicals: History of India in Two Centuries.” I hope the University offers more classes on South Asian Politics; they are needed.

*Views expressed are the author’s own. Contact Vibhav Mariwala at vibhavm@stanford.edu

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