The ruling NDA may rejoice that the Opposition has placed itself on the wrong side of history by giving the thumbs down to the Triple Talaq Bill, but it is bound to have mixed feelings on the rejection of the Citizenship Bill. On the one hand, its attempt to address the citizenship woes of lakhs of migrants has failed but on the other, the sustained conflict in the Northeast will now come to an end.
From the start, it was clear that political considerations would not allow a consensus on the Bills. The Opposition was concerned that supporting them would impact its minority votebank. The Triple Talaq Bill was passed after the Supreme Court declared the practice of quickie verbal divorces unconstitutional, bringing relief to thousands of Muslim women. Now that it has lapsed, the ball has been tossed right back to the apex court.
Sooner rather than later, it will have to clarify whether its August, 2017 judgment has effectively rendered Triple Talaq extinct and a criminal offence, even in the absence of a specific law (the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage Bill, 2018). The Citizenship Amendment Bill, which intended to confer citizenship on migrants who came to India as a result of religious persecution in their own country, was met with large-scale public protests in the Northeast.
The resistance to the Bill was based on two premises: first, that it violated the Constitution, and second, that the Northeast bears an unfair burden of illegal migration, which the Bill sought to partly legitimise. The first argument was technical, drawn from Article 15 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion.
Since the Bill referred to illegal immigrants from Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, it was aimed at only those communities which are in a minority there, that is, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. Muslims were naturally not included and this led many to dub the Bill as discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The second argument centred around the threat posed by illegal migration to the economy and culture of the Northeast. When the Assam Accord was signed in 1985, no distinction was drawn between Hindu and Muslim migrants and the centre promised to detect and deport all of them. Nothing of the sort happened and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was finalised only last year, at the instance of the apex court.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh was at pains to point out that the Bill applied to all Indian states and not just those of the Northeast. Hindu migrants in border states like Jammu & Kashmir and Rajasthan would also benefit. But it was the Northeast, which has borne the brunt of illegal migration, that became a theatre of protest. If Assam was resistant to Muslim and Hindu migrants, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh were wary of the Chakmas, a Buddhist tribal community believed to have crossed over to the state from Bangladesh.
Many of them were ousted from Mizoram and settled in Arunachal Pradesh. So strong was public sentiment against the Chakmas in these two states that even the Mizoram unit of the BJP had opposed the Bill. The fact remains that Hindus and practitioners of other faiths have been subjected to repeated attack in these countries. To cite a 2017 report in the New York Times, “Over almost two years, radical Islamists have carried out a string of brutal attacks in Bangladesh, killing scores of bloggers, foreigners and members of religious minorities..
The attacks were set off by outrage over an image on Facebook depicting the Hindu god Siva at a Muslim holy site in the city of Mecca.” The situation is no different in Afghanistan, where Sikhs and Hindus are targetted. Quoting from a 2018 report in The Times of India, “First, under Taliban rule, the minority Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan are told to identity themselves by wearing yellow armbands…Then, they were driven out of the country due to enforced discrimination and now, the Islamic state and likely Pakistani elements are systematically murdering them”.
Against this backdrop, the Bill was certainly humanitarian. (However, the same approach is missing vis-a-vis the Rohingya Muslims, who fled religious persecution in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, their country of origin. It also did not address the question of Hindus, Sikhs etc who came to India after the cut-off date of December 31, 2014, although it allayed fears of a massive influx from neighbouring countries.)
The BJP paid a heavy price to push the Bill, in the face of fears of cultural dilution and economic collapse. It sacrificed its alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and suffered another setback when Tez Hazarika, son of the late Bhupen Hazarika, who was awarded the Bharat Ratna last month, backed the protests.
It may still garner the goodwill of Hindu and other migrants, but will have to face a backlash from sub-nationalist forces. The lapsing of the Bills merely means that the resolution of the issues they sought to address has been prolonged, because they simply cannot be wished away.
Bhavdeep Kang is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author.
