Minister promises non-Muslim refugees Indian citizenship – Newspaper

NEW DELHI: The Indian government plans to revive a bill that would grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees even before a controversial citizen registration in a northeastern state is finalized, Interior Minister Amit Shah said Tuesday.

Shah, the leader of the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said in a speech in Kolkata that the party would grant citizenship "Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Christian settlers."

The proposal, framed as the Bill of Amendment of Citizenship, has stalled in the upper house of parliament. It would grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who have resided in India for at least six years.

A list of citizens in the state of Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a gigantic exercise to eliminate undocumented immigrants from the more than 32 million residents of Assam, which was published in August left almost two million residents, which potentially made them stateless.

The publication of the NRC, the result of a four-year application and a background investigation process, provoked strong reactions throughout Assam, which witnessed a popular movement against migrants in the 1980s. People whose names remained off the list they had 60 days to appeal to quasi-legal courts to prove their citizenship.

It is not clear what will happen to those who are ultimately qualified as foreigners because India does not have a treaty with Bangladesh to deport them. Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court of India criticized the central government and that of Assam, saying that thousands of people who had been declared foreigners over the years had disappeared. Nearly another 1,000 are detained in the overcrowded prisons of Assam.

The process was based on voluntary applications instead of a census from home to home. All Assam residents, who share a long and porous border with Bangladesh, were invited to request to be included in the list with documentation that would prove their lineage to a resident in good faith of the state on March 24, 1971, or earlier. before the launch of the military operation in former eastern Pakistan.

BJP supported the process, which critics have denounced as a simple attempt to deport millions of minority Muslims, many of whom entered India from neighboring Bangladesh. But those who have led the fight for that list say that the project is intended to protect the cultural identity of the indigenous peoples of Assam, regardless of their faith.

Posted on Dawn, October 2, 2019