The government of Bharat has notified the Citizenship Amendment Act. The opposition parties and the woke media are in an overdrive mode, criticizing the government for announcing the implementation of a law “excluding Muslims”. Media outlet The Wire has gone to the extent of quoting a Taliban spokesperson in the context of CAA who reportedly says that any such law should be for all “irrespective of religion”.
The article titled “CAA Should Be for All Persecuted People ‘Irrespective of Religion’, says Taliban. One is not sure whether this piece should be classified as propaganda or an attempt at black comedy. The mere idea of a media outlet quoting a Taliban spokesperson to criticize a law that seeks to protect the life and liberty of those very hapless individuals of non-Islamic faiths who have fled countries like Afghanistan due to the oppression and terror inflicted by the likes of Taliban, is preposterous, to say the least. It shows the extent of desperation that the woke media has reached in its attempt to pull down every law and policy enacted by the Modi government, by hook or by crook.
Anyhow, the point of this article is not to evaluate the diabolical hypocrisy of the woke media in its supposed criticism of the CAA. That deserves a separate piece altogether. But here, I’d like to point out how Bharat, by announcing its plans to implement CAA, has become the first country in the world to have such a provision in place for oppressed minorities of Islamic countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who managed to escape religious persecution. These minorities include Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis. Thus, Bharat essentially becomes the first country in the world to recognize the threat of persecution that non-Muslim migrants face in Islamic nations. That’s precisely why the woke Islamist lobby is rattled.
The word “refugee” or “asylum seeker” has come to be invariably associated with Muslim migrants from war-torn nations like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. Muslim migrants have altered the demography of many European countries; their desire for political power and Islamic supremacy has led to local people increasingly demanding tougher anti-immigration laws.
That’s also why many far right-wing parties in Europe are being supported by local people who see left or centrist moderate parties as going out of their way to appease migrants. But how often have you heard of Hindu asylum-seekers in European countries and the US, in the same vein as Muslim asylum-seekers? Or how many times have you heard of Hindus fleeing persecution from Islamic nations being given citizenship in countries like the US, UK, Germany, etc.?
There might be stray cases here and there, but the point is, that persecuted minorities in Islamic nations have never had any ecosystem to support their rights to seek asylum. Forget the ecosystem, the UN doesn’t even formally recognize the blatant ongoing persecution of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsees, and Buddhists in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The UN has to date not recognized the 1971 East Pakistan genocide that led to the formation of Bangladesh. Even as demand is mounting across the world for the recognition of this genocide by the UN and the Bangladesh government is taking this up itself, the UN doesn’t seem to consider this a priority.
In the 1971 East Pakistan genocide, approximately 3 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Hindus. The gruesome murders were carried out by the Pakistani military and the perpetrators were left unpunished as a consequence of the 1972 Shimla Accord between the then Bharatiya Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the then Pakistani President Z.A. Bhutto. An article published by The Sunday Guardian gives excellent insight into the dynamics of the exclusion of Hindu issues within the international system. The article argues that even as the government of Bangladesh is making claims for the UN to recognize the East Pakistan Genocide of 1971, it is trying to present that genocide as secular. That is, the fact that the majority of those 3 million people killed were Hindus is being underplayed.
The article further talks about the horrors of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh and quotes prominent Hindu voices from Bangladesh to make the point that it’s high time the world recognizes the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh. There is enough evidence available to prove the relentless persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh. Hindus in that country are routinely subjected to crimes ranging from abductions, sexual assaults, suicide bombings, forced conversions, land grabbing, etc.
The desecration of Hindu temples and the vandalization of the Moortis of Gods and Goddesses has become a routine affair in Bangladesh. The Hindu population of Bangladesh has gone down from approximately 20 percent in 1971 to 8.9 percent currently, as per various media reports. According to The Sunday Guardian article, “The Hindu American Foundation said in a report that 11.3 million Hindus have fled Bangladesh due to religious persecution and intolerance between 1964 and 2013. An additional 230,000 continue leaving annually, furthering the Hindu Bangladeshi diaspora”.
Hindus in Pakistan face a similar situation. The abduction and forceful conversion of underage Hindu girls by forcefully marrying them off to older men is a common occurrence in Pakistan. Blasphemy laws are routinely used against people of minority faiths to harass and intimidate them and to finally pressure them to convert. There are so many Hindu refugees from Pakistan living in the Majnu ka Tila area near Kashmiri Gate in Delhi. Yet, how many media stories did you see covering their plight before the CAA implementation announcement came into the picture?
The mainstream media does millions of stories covering the “plight” of Rohingyas, the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. But I haven’t come across a single story talking about the plight of Hindu refugees, or even giving them a voice for that matter. They have been living pitifully for decades, to say the least, invisible to the media and the Lutyens elite. That’s why the enactment of CAA is a huge step forward not just in terms of making it easier and hassle-free for those Hindus from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, who came to Bharat till 2014 and settled here, but also in terms of making the plight of persecuted Hindus of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh a global issue.
The leftist-Islamist nexus has hijacked the CAA narrative to such an extent that any discussion on CAA doesn’t even talk about the actual issue, which is why the need for such a law came in the first place. Bharatiya Muslims have nothing to do with the CAA. Home Minister Amit Shah even clarified in a detailed interview with ANI recently that Muslim citizens of Bharat wouldn’t be affected by CAA in any way. Yet, ever since 2019, the leftist-Islamist nexus has built a cunning narrative of CAA being discriminatory against Muslims because it excludes Muslims. This is akin to saying that a law demanding reservation for women should not be passed because it excludes men. CAA categorically states that its intent is to provide Bharatiya citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from Muslim-majority countries.
If the intent of a law is to save minorities living in Islamic countries from atrocities and oppression that are inflicted on them by virtue of them being non-Muslims, how can the law extend similar provisions to Muslims from those countries? This doesn’t make sense logically. As Amit Shah clarified in the ANI interview as well, Bharat already has ample provisions under the Citizenship Act through which anyone facing any form of harassment, from any country, irrespective of their religion, can apply for citizenship in Bharat. The Bharatiya government will decide these cases on a case-to-case merit basis, keeping in mind the national security and safety of the country.
By making the CAA an issue of “discrimination against Muslims”, the leftist-Islamist lobby has changed the direction of the discourse and prevented any fruitful discussion on the need for the CAA in the first place. In 2019, instead of the Shaheen Bagh protests and the gang of woke intellectuals and celebrities lending smoke to the fire, the television news channels and newspapers should have told us about the harrowing conditions in which refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, have been living all over Bharat.
Along with the Shaheen Bagh histrionics, they should have also given the audience a background on the persecution of Hindus in Islamic countries, and how this has never made it to the world media. The western media, even now when the CAA has been enacted, takes a rather superficial, biased, and one-sided view of the whole thing parroting the “CAA is anti-Muslim” narrative. I mean the whole western media coverage of CAA enactment is so typical and jaded that one doesn’t even feel like talking about it again and again. It’s the same old trope of burying one’s head under the sand like an ostrich when it comes to issues impacting Hindus.
It’s incredible that a law meant to pave the way for citizenship of persecuted religious minorities from Islamic countries is being discussed by the world media only from the point of view of its supposed impact on Muslims. None is talking about the rights of the people the law is seeking to protect. Why is the international media, for all its claims of objectivity and ethical journalism, not giving any space to points of view of non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh living in Bharat or any organization speaking on their behalf?
Most of the western media coverage of CAA doesn’t have any representation or voice from the side of those whom the law intends to benefit. They start from the premise that the law is anti-Muslim, and then go on to talk about the Shaheen Bagh protests and quote all those Bharatiya woke intellectuals who spit venom against the law without any reason or rationality. The report is done. The logic of the story: CAA is anti-Muslim because many woke intellectuals, and the Islamists think it’s anti-Muslim. But this level of below-kindergarten logic is not expected from so-called “top-notch media publications”.
But no matter how much the leftist-Islamists will try to hijack the narrative by making CAA a “discrimination against Muslims” issue when it clearly has nothing to do with Bharatiya Muslims, the enactment of CAA by the government will lead to further visibility of the issue of persecution of Hindu minorities in Islamic countries on a global platform. That’s the biggest achievement of CAA; at the moment Bharat is the only country in the world that has taken cognizance of the persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Even though the 2014 deadline seems unfair, technically, the government should open the doors of citizenship to all Hindus from these countries, irrespective of when they entered Bharat. But alas, in a political system still under the spell of the Lutyens’ elite, the government cannot do everything all together, at once. It needs to clean up the system slowly but firmly, bit by bit, and I believe we are going in the right direction.
