Daily Times

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur, India. The basic aim behind creating this radical party was to propagate the cause of Hindu Rashtra (a Hindu state). Hedgewar was not happy about the one thousand year’s long rule of Muslims, followed by Christians (British). V.D Savarkar, who was the president of Hindu Mahasabha, also endorsed the idea of India as a Hindu Rashtra. He was a great admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. He said that only Hindus should rule India and others should either be expelled or merged into Hindu majority. In 1948, Savarkar was charged as a conspirator in the assassination of Mahatama Gandhi. During the election campaign, Modi promised to confer “Bharat Ratan” on Savarkar. Golwalkar was the second supreme leader of the RSS, who also praised Nazism and believed the ideology should be applied to India. He also idolised holocaust and thought it to be an effective way to deal with the minorities of India. He was arrested for the murder of Gandhi, and RSS was banned for promoting violence and subversion. Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi, was an activist of the RSS. Golwalker categorised Muslims and Christians as India’s internal enemies. Another hard-line organisation is Shiv Sena (Army of Shivaji), which also sought inspiration from Nazi Germany. In 1967, Bal Thackeray said, “it is Hitler that is needed in India today,” in an interview to Time magazine. In 1993, he said, “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word “Jew” and put in the word “Muslim,” that is what I believe.”

In 1980, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the political arm of RSS, morphed into BJP. In 1984 elections, the BJP got only two seats and struggled to make an impression. However, in the 2014 elections, the BJP won 272 of the 543 seats in Lok Sabha and formed a coalition government. In 2019, the BJP came back in power for the second time because its election campaign focused on anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam rhetoric. To fulfil their election campaign promises and RSS ideology, on August 5, the BJP-led government scrapped Articles 370 and 35-A, which granted Indian Occupied Kashmir a special status after deploying additional two lac troops. According to the BJP’s president, Amit Shah, removing these articles had been in our manifesto since 1950, and it was our commitment to the people of India. The most violent events took place in 2002 in Gujrat when Modi was chief minister. He turned a blind eye to the violence, and his administration facilitated mobs to kill Muslims across the state. The Gujrat massacre of Muslims was preplanned, and it is said that the state government and the police were a part of planning with the consent of the then chief minister, Modi. On November 9, while Pakistan was welcoming thousands of Sikhs to their holiest place Kartarpur inside Pakistan, Indian Supreme Court awarded the control of Babri Masjid to the party, who demolished it in 1992. It was evident that the judgment was biased and managed and the move was truly against the Muslims of India.

The cover story behind the CAB is to protect minorities, but the real essence is to target the Indian Muslims

Muslims prayed at the Babri Masjid for generations until 1949, when Hindu radicals placed idols of Ram. Similarly, during election campaigns, Modi also promised that he would get the National Registration of Citizens (NRC) implemented in Assam to deal with Muslims immigrants from Bangladesh. The BJP president said that these infiltrators were eating away our country, like termites. In August, nearly two million people, majority Muslims, have been declared as illegally staying in the state. They have been told to prove their citizenship; failing which will be put in detention camps for deportation. Moreover, people have been told in Assam that those whose names do not appear on NRC, the burden of proof is on them to prove that they are citizens of India. No doubt, it was a simple attempt to justify religious discrimination against Muslims in the state. Now, India has introduced another controversial bill, the Citizen Amendment Bill (CAB). This bill was first put before Lok Sabha in July 2016 and it was passed by Lok Sabha. Yet, it hasn’t passed through in the Rajya Sabha after a violent protest in North East India. The recent bill was passed on December 10, 2019, with 311 members voting in favour and 80 against the bill. It was also passed by Rajya Sabha on December 11 with 125 votes in favour and 105 votes against it. According to CAB, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jains, Parsis and Christians who had entered India illegally can now apply for citizenship if they can prove that they came to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Home Minister Amit Shah, while presenting the bill, lied before the Lok Sabha that the minority population in Pakistan was 23 per cent in 1951, which has now shrunk. According to him, while the number of Muslims in India went up, minorities, including Hindus in Pakistan, declined. According to him, they had been converted or made to flee or were killed. For his information, that was the percentage when the country had two wings and majority Hindus were now in East Pakistan (Bangladesh).

The Hindu population in Pakistan has not changed from its 1951 level of around 1.5 to two per cent. In Afghanistan, the minority population is 0.3 per cent as in 2018, there were just 700 Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan. The new legislation primarily targets 200 million Muslims of India in a larger perspective. Muslims are now required to prove that they were original residents of India, not refugees. An idea appeared to be borrowed from Nazi ideology. In 1935, the Nazis announced new laws, which institutionalised many racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying persons of “German related blood.”

Now, the NRC is proposed nationwide while the Assam model will be replicated across India, which is the basic intention of CAB.

The cover story behind the CAB is to protect minorities, but the real essence is to target the Indian Muslims. In this legislation, Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are excluded because they are not facing any discrimination. But look at the double standards of Modi-led government. They did not mention Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, facing persecution and systematic genocide. Modi’s government was trying to evict the Rohingya Muslims from the Indian soil on one pretext or the other. For Assamese, this bill is a betrayal of the Assam accord. According to which, all those who entered Assam after March 24, 1971, were not to be given citizenship by extending the period up to December 31, 2014, for legalising illegal migrants. Assam is one of the most multi-ethnic states, including Bengali, Assamese-speaking Hindus and tribal people with different beliefs. A third of its 32 million citizens are Muslims, the second-highest after India Occupied Kashmir. The fear in Assam is that the large influx will change the region’s demography, and it is a threat to their culture, tradition and language. It is also feared the legislation will legitimatise millions of Bengali-speaking Hindus and open the floodgates for more migration from Bangladesh. There are widespread violence and protests against the bill across India while curfew has been imposed in Assam and Tripura. Protests are being held in cities like Mumbai, Dehli, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kerala and Karnataka. Chief ministers of Indian states of West Bengal, Punjab, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have said that they will not implement the legislation. Twelve people were killed in Uttar Pradesh alone in the ongoing protest against the bill. This bill certainly violates the so-called secular principles, on which the Indian constitution is based. The faith cannot be made a condition of citizenship as per articles 14 and 15 of the Indian constitution that guarantee the right to equality and non-discrimination. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said: “India is taking a dangerous turn in the wrong direction.” They also called for sanctions against Amit Shah and other principal leadership over the passage of the bill. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said, “the CAB is an attempt to ethnically cleanse the North East. It is a criminal act on the North East their way of life and idea of India.”

Another Congress leader, Shashi Tharoor, said it was fundamentally unconstitutional. More than 1000 eminent Indian politicians, journalist, lawyers, academics and actors have signed a statement categorically condemning the bill. Amnesty International India termed CAB a clear violation of the Indian constitution and international human rights law. It further said it legitimises discrimination based on religion. Bangladesh has raised a strong objection against the bill, and its foreign minister cancelled its scheduled visit to India. Indian Union Muslim League petitioned Supreme Court of India to declare the bill illegal. This is the first time in the so-called largest democracy and secular India that now, the citizenship will be based on religion. The BJP-RSS led government intends to replicate the NRC across India to remove all infiltrators by 2024, of course, all Muslims. Member of BJP, Rajeshwar Singh, recently said, “Muslims and Christians will be wiped out of India by 31 December 2021.”

That reflects the BJP-RSS policy towards Muslims in India. With BJP in power, Muslims are increasingly facing discrimination and marginalisation since 2014, when the BJP came into power. The BJP-led government has created an atmosphere of fear among 14 per cent Muslims population of India. The BJP-led governments in states are rewriting history textbooks to downplay Islamic rule and contribution to Indian history and heritage. During Modi’s last government, several Muslims were lynched over allegations of eating beef and for transporting cattle for slaughter. Through these steps, the Modi government has pushed forward the agenda of Hindutva replacing the old-age philosophy of Indian secularism.

The writer is a retired brigadier and freelance columnist