India at a Crossroads

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm your guest host, Dan Richards. India, the world's largest democracy, is facing a moment of reckoning.

SUBJECT 1: Thousands marched in the southern cities of Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.

- Unrest in India over that controversial new citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims.

SUBJECT 2: The government what are they doing, they're trying to make us minority in our own very state, in our own very religion.

DAN RICHARDS: These protests started in December in response to a new law called the Citizenship Amendment Act. It's being championed by India's prime minister Narendra Modi and it would make it more difficult for Muslims to become full citizens in India.

SUBJECT 3: Opponents of the new law say that it's sectarian and undermines India's secular constitution.

DAN RICHARDS: But as our two guests today explain, this is just the most recent move in a building tension between Modi's Hindu nationalist administration and India's minorities. In August, Modi's government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its political autonomy within India, a special status the region had held in the country for decades. In order to quell any protest or dissent, the government instituted a military lockdown and communications blackout, which has crippled the region. So today a look at these current crises in India and how they're part of a bigger story about citizenship and belonging in one of the world's most populous and diverse countries.

On the show we have Sara Shneiderman Associate Professor in Anthropology and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. And Sahana Ghosh, postdoctoral fellow at the Watson institute. Sara, Sahana, thanks so much for being on the show.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Thank you.

SAHANA GHOSH: Thank you, Dan, for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: So I wanted to start with some of the things that have been going on most recently in India that have been coming into headlines in Western media outlets more and more, especially this past December. And I wonder if you could just describe a little bit of what's been going on.

SAHANA GHOSH: So, in December, the Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed by Parliament, which enacts a constitutional amendment to citizenship by stipulating that immigrants to India of different faiths from neighboring countries, excluding Muslims, will be given refuge and put on a fast track to citizenship. And this has been widely perceived as radically changing the secular principles of citizenship constitutionally enshrined in India and has led to protests across the country. What has been remarkable and perhaps has caught the attention of the Western media is the tremendous violence with which the state has come down on these protests.

DAN RICHARDS: And said this act, the Citizenship Amendment Act, it's effectively singling out Muslims as making it much more difficult for them to become citizens. That's like the net effect of this act?

SAHANA GHOSH: I would put it a different way, which is that it very clearly stipulates minority-- religious minorities in neighboring countries who are fleeing religious persecution and names them in a way that very noticeably excludes Muslims. So it's very-- that absence of Muslim minorities fleeing religious persecution is very noticeable.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Right and perhaps we'll get there as soon as that the Citizenship Amendment Act needs to be understood in the context of another dynamic that's been ongoing over the last several years, which is the national register of citizens. And this is a program that has been in a sense authorized by the central state but today, as yet only implemented within one state-- that's the state of Assam-- which essentially requires everybody who's resident within India's borders to produce documentation of their claim to citizenship.

Now, for anybody who might have difficulty doing that for any reason-- in a sense, the Citizenship Amendment Act will make it even more difficult for them to appeal if they happen to come from a Muslim background. So you have to see these two different dynamics working in tandem, one of which is a process by which everybody has to declare themselves and show their documentation and the second of which then makes it impossible for those from certain backgrounds who for any reason might have inconsistencies in their documentation to appeal or take other recourse. And so those two things acting together have, I think, ignited this sense that really the central values of secularism and the definition of citizenship that have always been enshrined in India to date are really under threat.

DAN RICHARDS: And so there is, it seems, this complex and nuanced overlapping of things between the National Register of Citizenship and the Citizenship Amendment Act that are interacting in these really sort of troubling ways and I want to get back to that. But I wonder if, first, maybe we could even take a step further back sort of to something you were saying about how citizenship has been defined or understood in India more historically.

tition of the subcontinent in: 1947

state coming into being from: 1947

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Now, something to add to that as well, which I think is a crucial piece of understanding why these issues are so emotive, is that none of these countries have provisions for dual citizenship with countries across their borders. So in contrast, for instance, I am a US citizen, but I currently reside in Canada. It's possible for me to apply for Canadian citizenship in due course and still to maintain my US citizenship, and I have many colleagues and friends who do just that. In the context that we're talking about here, that's simply an impossibility between India and Bangladesh, for instance, to maintain citizenship, formally speaking, within both countries.

So that leads to this situation when if you have India saying, aha, this category of people no longer has full claim to citizenship, they also have no full claim to citizenship elsewhere. And for people who do have cross-border lives, who have moved back and forth both for reasons of trade, business, and also keeping up kinship or family connections to think that, in fact, they might have no claim then to citizenship is very difficult precisely because they have connections and more than one country. That's in a sense the irony of the situation.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow, yeah, it seems like something that given this history of migration and refugee-based migration and sort of movement between these borders, the fact that also though you can't have, at times, dual citizenship, it seems like, yeah, a recipe for tension.

SAHANA GHOSH: Absolutely. And, again, historically, this discourse about the illegal immigrant, this discourse around illegal immigration, this kind of fear mongering and demonization of a legal immigrant is hardly a recent product of the Modi government. And this kind of atmosphere in which the enemy is always the neighbor, so it's either the Pakistanis or the Bangladeshis both Muslim majority countries has been central to the kind of divisive rhetoric around who is a citizen and who cannot be a citizen in India for a long time.

relatively recent and before: 1947

DAN RICHARDS: So these tensions have clearly been building for a long time. But I wonder, for listeners who are just vaguely familiar with it too, like even a little bit about who is this person? Narendra Modi?

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Modi got his political startup as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. And one of the things that he was notorious for during his time in that role was what is often recognized as a pogrom or a terrible attack against Muslims in his home state of Gujarat in Two Thousand and Two, which he not only did nothing to quell, but, in fact, many believe that he was complicit in the role of chief minister of enabling state security forces to carry out mob violence in a mass-- at a mass scale against Muslims in his home state. After that, Modi was actually banned from receiving a US visa for some time due to the suspicion of his involvement in these events. Now, cut to Twenty-Fourteen, when Modi has, on the basis of his economic successes in Gujarat, become a national political figure, the leader of the BJP party, and wins the national election. All of this somehow seems to have been forgotten or receded into the background, at least in the kind of international community's view.

In any case, Modi then comes into the role of prime minister in Twenty-Fourteen on a very clear electoral platform, which includes all of the things that we're seeing happen now. They were not all implemented immediately, in part because the electoral win was not necessarily a mandate or a landslide, but when Modi was then re-elected last year with higher numbers, of course, it became clear I think to him and his party supporters that this was now the moment to implement the many elements of the Hindu nationalist agenda that had long been at the core of their political platforms.

DAN RICHARDS: How did things change under the Modi administration, or how is the tension perhaps been ratcheted up or altered in some way?

SAHANA GHOSH: So two developments in August of Twenty-Nineteen, last year now, are, I think, crucial to understand together in the way in which the Hindu nationalist project of the Modi government, of the re-elected Modi government, really ratcheted up this attack on citizenship, and weaponizing citizenship in service of the Hindu nationalist project.

So the first move was the unilateral abrogation of the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, and its break up into two smaller political units with no political representation and autonomy of their own. And this is in complete denial of the Kashmiri demands for self-determination and freedom. It was accompanied by an enormous increase in the deployment of security forces in what is already the most militarized police on earth, a complete internet communications shut down that continues five months on till date.

Along with that, at the end of August Twenty-Nineteen, the national register of citizens for Assam was published. Almost two million people, two million residents of Assam, have been left out of this list and potentially rendered and faced statelessness, as Sara mentioned, there being no dual citizenship in the region, these 1.9 million people left out of the register have nowhere else to go and have nowhere else to call home. And so despite this kind of outcome of the Assam NRC, the government's announcements of extending the NRC to the rest of the country is one of the things that has really come together with the Citizenship Amendment Act to bring people out onto the streets.

DAN RICHARDS: And so something you both have expressed is this idea that what was happening with the National Registry of Citizenship in Assam and with what's happening in Kashmir are these almost peripheral efforts to, as you say, weaponize citizenship. Would it be accurate to say they're almost kind of trials for how something could be implemented more widely? Or how would you look at them as related, basically?

SAHANA GHOSH: I think they're absolutely central to the Hindu nationalist project, and it's no coincidence that both of these are carried out in what are both geographical borderlands, but also marginal to the kind of dominant Indian nationalist public sphere and public imagination. And so in that sense, yes, absolutely, I think you're spot on in saying that they are somewhat trials. I think they are trials for two different things.

So I think analysts, quite rightly, particularly Kashmiri scholars and analysts, have pointed out that the first kind of move was this abrogation of Kashmir's autonomous status. And the government didn't expect any resistance or protest to that, because the Kashmir question, the question of Kashmiri self-determination, of Kashmiri voices demanding freedom, has been a blind spot for Indian liberal secular progressives of all stripes, and of all kinds of political dispensations.

Kashmir has been widely, broadly regarded as an internal matter of the Indian Federation, and most people would insist on Kashmir remaining a part of India and not be out to, you know, would not cast their support for Kashmiri voices demanding freedom and the right to self-determination. So it was a trial in the sense of seeing what kind of public response there would be.

With Assam's NRC, I think it was a trial in a more pragmatic, material sense, which is that going through the administrative, the enormous bureaucratic process of across a state which spans plains, hills, rivers, forests, all kinds of geographical terrain, to enumerate every single individual, to kind of try out a bureaucratic process and see how that works, what the problems are, before they roll it out to the rest of the country.

So in that sense, the borderlands of India have always been sort of laboratories where all kinds of policing surveillance practices have been tried out. And the Kashmiris have been repressed, have been violently, absolutely violently quelled with the most brutal measures for decades. Again, something not particular to this government, but perhaps ratcheted up with this government. But with disappearances, with encounter killings, with sexual violence. I mean, the list of the brutalities against the Kashmiri people in and of borderland populations protesting the kinds of policing and surveillance they face runs very long.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Just to add to that, one of the ways in which we found it helpful to think about these dynamics which we've also written about in our recent conversation piece is that in a sense India is implementing two different kinds of strategies to suppress voices that may in some way dissent from the sort of centrist notion of what the ideal national citizen is, which is basically a Hindu citizen.

tently since the partition of: 1947

And so what the recent acts in August of this year do is to say no sorry, we won't even countenance that kind of demand. Rather, we're going to forcibly include all of Kashmir's 8 million citizens in the polity in a way in which they have even less ability to act with self-determination over their own governance, resource allocation, et cetera, than they did before. So that's forced inclusion.

The other strategy is that of forced exclusion. And that's what you have at work in the NRC in Assam. So identifying who is a citizen and saying to those who are not, you don't belong here, you have nowhere to go. There is now credible reports that there are many detention centers under construction in Assam to house people who may be rendered stateless or non-citizens by exclusion from the NRC. So as Sahana was saying, these are both in a sense strategies that are being tested with these borderland populations in places that are far away from the centers of the Indian polity and where I think it was perceived that the influencers, so to speak, might not notice, and might not really take heed.

But what's happened now is that you have both of these strategies now migrating into the center, and that's what's really happened with the Indian state's response to the recent spate of protests around the Citizenship Amendment Act. So in Delhi, as well as in other cities around the country, now you have students and scholars and civil society members and all manner of activists coming out together in mass protest, and when they do that then the state cracks down, and you also see shades of Modi's complicity in those earlier events in Gujarat back in the early two thousands that I mentioned earlier. So what we see now is that people at the heart of India's centers of power are now experiencing what borderland populations in places like Kashmir and Assam have been experiencing for many decades.

DAN RICHARDS: And so what was it about the Citizenship Amendment Act, which I know we talked about at the beginning of the discussion, what was it about it that brought it into the more central, mainstream consciousness?

SAHANA GHOSH: Two things I'll say about that. One, secularism has made a comeback. So far from being an abstract theoretical idea, the notion of the Constitution of India as being this object that belongs to all the people, which is something that defines and protects secularism as the basis of inclusive citizenship, that does not differentiate on the grounds of religion, is something that people, especially what's particularly noticeable, is that young people, students, youth across not just the metropolitan centers, but towns, smaller cities across the country, campuses across the country, young people have been, students have been out on the streets holding up pictures of the Constitution, holding up posters of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who's the formidable Dalit leader, political theorist, and author of the Constitution.

So people have really galvanized around claiming both the Constitution as theirs, and the secular nature of the Constitution as theirs to protect. And nationalism, it is love for the country, that is getting people out on the streets. And it's the love for a country that is democratic and inclusive rather than these kinds of decisions being taken in the name of the people, but being implemented in absolutely undemocratic ways, any voice of dissent being quelled, that's really-- it's kind of had a domino effect in the sense that the government's attempt to suppress dissent has actually brought way more people out on the streets by making very clear the undemocratic nature of this dispensation.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: To add to that, I think one of the reasons why the CAA has, in a sense, been the straw that broke the camel's back and generated this wave of protest is because it is a legal instrument at the federal level. All of the other things that we're talking about can still be seen as peripheral or state, as in the sense of India's federal states, only relevant to single states of Kashmir or Assam for instance, whereas the CAA is something which was actually passed by the federal parliament, federal legislature, and therefore I think people who had been observing all of these dynamics in particular hot spots around the country suddenly realized that this was coming home to them, and that they couldn't be ignored as simply something happening elsewhere anymore.

And I also think another one of the issues is that when you look at it at the level of cultural practice and day to day lives, there are so many Muslim luminaries in India, whether you're looking at the academic world, or the world of Bollywood film stars, or other sectors. It's very clear that there are a great many people who India would not be India without from that background.

And so because the CAA specifically singles out Muslims and does that at a federal level, I think it has sort of cut through to consciousness also in many sort of elite contexts as well, where people realized this could actually affect me, or could affect people who I'm close to or I care about. So although the effects of these laws will be felt most by poor and marginalized communities, in a sense the fact that they could affect anybody who in any way has a connection with various minority groups, that's been important, and also as Sahana said, that it leaves people scrambling to think well, what's my documentation status, and how am I going to step up when I have to produce this as well? So it's very personal, I think.

DAN RICHARDS: Well yeah, and that makes me think of-- you know, it's been disturbing and tragic images coming out over the last month, but also, and not to force a note of optimism, but you're seeing at least in the Western press, headlines like we're witnessing the rediscovery of India's republic, and it seems like there is at least a sense that there could be some sort of turning point right now, and these coalitions are being formed in a way that hasn't been in a long time. And I wonder how you both feel about the current state and what these protests might lead to.

SAHANA GHOSH: I want to be hopeful. I sure hope that the protests, the kind of solidarities that are visible not everywhere, I would say, across these protests --Kashmir continues to be somewhat sidelined in many of the protests-- there is always a danger of central locations overpowering our attention and our focus. So the assaults on campuses in Delhi or Mumbai-- and I think this is an incredible moment. I think the youth across the country, and particularly in different kinds of cities, people of all ages, professions, engineering, technical schools that are traditionally seen to be apolitical have been issuing statements, have been out on the streets.

So you know, it is very much a turning point in some ways, and I'm incredibly amazed and inspired by the brave and very creative kinds of protests that are emerging. At the same time, I want to be cautious and mindful of insisting on broad-based solidarities. No one can be free until we're all free.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Yeah, I think one of the other dynamics that I hope will be gaining force now is international attention to all of these issues. The US Congress has held hearings on Kashmir, but I believe that a final resolution is not yet public. But that may be forthcoming. I do think that in a way it's very sad that things have to become so bad to actually draw international media attention, as well as political attention. But I do think that that's starting to happen.

And as I said earlier, I do think that this reputation of India as the world's largest democracy has in a way allowed Modi and his collaborators to get away with many things scot-free that simply should not have gone unattended. So I suppose I'm hopeful that at least the broader attention that's being slowly trained on these issues may lead to various kinds of action.

I think we need the business community, particularly the tech sector with its strong engagements in India, to take notice and to begin making statements as some have done already, using their leverage, really, to influence matters, and to be clear that these kinds of state-sanctioned violence and the kinds of policies that Modi has been rapidly implementing are not acceptable to the rest of the world. And so I do have some hope that there will be more action on that front soon.

DAN RICHARDS: Before we end this conversation, I also just wanted to ask, is there anything you think needs to be understood that we haven't discussed in the context of this conversation, or any question you wished I'd asked, or thing you hope the listener would make sure to take away?

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: I would just offer the concluding comment that the notion that India is the world's largest democracy, that's in a way, in a sense, in the past. I mean, it's still large, and it still is at least formally, obviously, a democracy, but this idea that somehow its status as a secular democratic country puts it out of range for the kinds of critiques and various types of actions that might be put in place vis-a-vis other countries who don't have that sort of reputation on the world stage, that time is over.

SAHANA GHOSH: Yeah, I think that's actually a very important point, that it has not been a democracy for Kashmiris for a very long time. It has not been a democracy for people protesting in Assam or in the northeast where the armed forces are protected by all kinds of draconian laws that give them impunity. So absolutely, Sara, I think what Sara has just said about this kind of moniker that allows all kinds of actions to just fly just because one thinks that it is a secular, vibrant democracy. And there is always going to be some dissent and some protest. That just is not true.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: I just want to be clear, too, that this is not only a critique levied at India. I think that's also a critique that we can turn inwards to our thinking about the US as well. The notion that just because both countries are secular democracies, that the checks and balances will always work, and that we don't need to worry about that, I think that's really the key issue. And so the question really becomes more broadly speaking then, how do we actually work to reassert not only democratic values, which is often what we hear, but democratic practice, whether it's in the US or in India, when we see the consistent attacks on these systems that we are sort of trained to sort of believe in.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, thank you both Sara and Sahana so much for talking with us. Hopefully we'll have you both on again soon.

SARA SHNEIDERMAN: Thanks.

SAHANA GHOSH: Thank you, Dan. Thank you for this conversation.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Jackson Cantrell. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Sarah Baldwin will be back next week. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you hear, leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It really helps others find the show. For more information about this and Watson's other podcasts, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening, and tune in next week for another episode of Trending Globally.