After all. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind gave his formal assent to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019—thereby making it as an Act –allowing Indian citizenship to six non-Muslim minority migrants hailing from in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. For the Indian opposition parties, the bill is unconstitutional as it grants citizenship on a person’s religion and consequently, it would further marginalize India’s 200-million strong Muslim community. The present government, ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the bill seeks to protect religious minorities who fled persecution in their respective native countries. Obviously, the Government in New Delhi remains engaged in increasingly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. And yet, neutral analysis of the situation suggests that New Delhi new bill, a Modi’s faux pas is a recipe for promoting communal, cultural and constitutional centrifugalism in India. Public protests – and violent police crackdowns on masses – are in full swing in cities throughout India, , including in major cities such as Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and the capital New Delhi, mostly around university campuses. Meanwhile, ongoing protests in Assam, in India’s northeast, turned violent set off by the passage of a controversial new citizenship law. The Indian interior minister has had once called migrants entering into the Indian Territory illegally termites and pledged to expel them. Remind fully, earlier this year, Indian authorities are seen to have completed a byzantine process aimed at identifying migrants in the northeastern state of Assam. Resultantly about 2 million people were left off the final list of citizens, apprehending that they could be rendered stateless or deported. This selective yet prejudicial move would give migrants of all of South Asia’s major religions a passport to warrant Indian citizenship – excluding Muslims. The said measure endorsing Hindus’ religious bigotry against Islam will profoundly alter India’s secular nature enshrined by its founding leaders when the country gained independence in 1947. Public remonstrance is rampant in India calling this bill a black law, making an attack on the Constitution and a black stigma on Indian claim as the largest democracy in the world. Therefore, hundreds of prominent intellectuals signed an angry petition against this ultranationalist bill, while in parliament’s upper house speaker after speaker rose to lambast the bill, when the bill did pass into law on December 11th, it could see only a 21-vote majority in the 245-seat house. The installation of a BJP government with an overriding majority under Narendra Modi would make the opposition totally desperate is understandable but the country has to ensure that India’s domestic scene was not fouled up at the cost of national security Clearly now, in just months, Modi has tried to introduce some of the most deviously intended legislations-seeking to achieve some ulterior motives. In August, the Modi Government reversed seven decades of policy in Kashmir, stripping the Muslim-majority state of its autonomy and instituting a crackdown that endures to this day. And most mischievously last month, India’s Supreme Court greenlighted the construction of a grand Hindu temple at the site of the Babari Masjid, a 16th-century mosque illegally razed by Hindu extremistsin 1992. The government has also engaged in increasingly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. And yet, critics blame that the bill is part of a BJP’s communal agenda of marginalizing the Muslims in India. The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed the upper house of parliament, where the BJP lacks a majority, by 125 votes to 105 on 11 December. It had cleared the lower house two days earlier. The bill has already prompted widespread protests in the north-east of the country which borders Bangladesh, as many people there say they would be overrun by immigrants from across the border. Those critics of the bill also say it is another example of how Modi and his BJP party have pushed an agenda of Hindu nationalism onto secular India, a country of 1.3 billion people, at the expense of the Muslim population in India including Indian occupied Kashmir. The BJP, which was re-elected in May, has its roots in India’s Hindu right-wing movement, many followers of which see India as a Hindu nation. “The bill uses the language of refuge and sanctuary, but discriminates on religious grounds in violation of international law,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. Three factors play a significant role in promoting forces of centrifugalism in India: Firstly that the installation of a BJP government with an overriding majority under Narendra Modi would make the opposition totally desperate is understandable but the country has to ensure that India’s domestic scene was not fouled up at the cost of national security. Modi’s ‘sabka saath sabka vikas’ and emphasis on strict law enforcement – this happens to be in the domain of State governments – are apparently the real cause of democratic failure because they will not lead to success unless the leaders indulging in the false rhetoric about minorities not feeling ‘safe’ in India were silenced through stern legal action. Secondly, the ‘Muslim factor’ in India is intrinsically mounting to affect the domestic security structure-thereby linking to the deliberate attempt of the Modi to project Kashmir issue through the lens of communal spectrum. Muslim minorities are being subjected to cultural exclusivism. Instead of embracing people of all regions and communities in the integral state of J&K the Modi’s government seems preoccupied with preserving Hindu identity not only in the socio-political engineering of the Vale but also in the whole Indian region. The colossal denial of Muslim separatist movement in Kashmir by the Centre is itself a fatal recipe for inviting disintegration of India. The more the Modi’s government tries to alienate the Kashmir Muslim population’s leanings toward Pakistan, the more the bonds of Kashmiris’ affiliation with Pakistan. The strategic structure of Indian internal security would become more vulnerable due to the expanding roots of the Kashmir conflict. The veritable truth is that for common Kashmiris – if only they were left alone by the dint of force to live within the Indian domain, they would certainly prefer to die in the cause of freedom from the Indian rule of tyranny. Centre’s Kashmir policy-sowing the seeds of dissension -has become the pivot of undermining external and internal Indian security structures. And most significantly, the recently approved Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) does exactly the opposite of secularism since it fundamentally violates every one of these fundamental values and spreads the wings of “Hindutva,” or Hindu nationalism, in this so-called secular country by making religion the key to citizenship. This unconstitutional act clearly violates and shreds the provisions in the Indian constitution that guarantee citizens’ right to equality, equality before the law and non-discriminatory treatment by the Indian state. The so- called foundation of secularism once imbibed in the Indian constitution now remains in tatters. Truly, Modi’s agenda of ‘ultranationalist legislation’ is weaving the fabric of many- sided centrifugalism in India. The writer is an independent ‘IR’ researcher and international law analyst based in Pakistan