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Backlash to India's New Citizenship Law Poses Challenge to Modi

Anjana Pasricha

   NEW DELHI - When India's contentious new citizenship law passed easily
   through parliament, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has
   a strong majority, few in his government anticipated a violent backlash
   to it.
   In the week since its passage, protests have raged through the country,
   vehicles have been torched, thousands of students from some of the
   country's most prestigious universities have marched in the streets,
   and opposition leaders have joined growing calls to scrap the law.
   The protests pose the most serious opposition that Modi has confronted
   since he took power six years ago riding a wave of popularity.
   The law has brought to the forefront worries long voiced by the prime
   minister's opponents and critics that his government's policies will
   relegate some 200 million Muslims -- the country's largest minority --
   to second class citizens as it pursues a Hindu nationalist agenda. It
   was passed five months after his government scrapped the autonomy of
   Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state.
   The new law will fast track citizenship for six non-Muslim religious
   minorities -- Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Buddhists, and Jains
   -- who fled religious persecution from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and
   Pakistan. However it excludes Islam, a major religious group in South
   Asia.

   "Our refugee policy cannot be on religious grounds because our
   constitution does not allow it," said Rahul Kapoor, a research scholar
   at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, echoing the voices of
   Hindu and Muslim students at a protest. "It can be on humanitarian
   grounds. There can be no religious profiling."

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