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In sharp contrast to the traditional ushering in of a New Year as a harbinger of good tidings and happiness, India on the night of 31st December 2019, rocked by protests against religious discrimination, seems the very epitome of the vision conjured up by the lines of Auden (1944)—“if we did not have a hated ‘them’ to turn against, there would not be a loving ‘us’ to turn to.”
Elections come and go, political parties win or lose. However, the deep fissures and schisms brought about in a society through polarized politics extract a heavy price in escalating violence and suffering and are well nigh impossible to mend.
The marginalization of Jewish people and their exclusion from economic life through changes in law between 1933 and 1939 brought about by the Nazi Party in Germany is well known. From mandatory markers of identity culminating in the process of demonizing the “other” by deportation to concentration camps and their ultimate death in gas chambers is memorialized today as a horrific period in human history. Yet, insidious changes in the Indian polity are quietly making history without international scrutiny.
In independent India, in a first, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Government, which enjoys an overwhelming majority in Parliament enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) which grants citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains and Christians from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan and pointedly excludes Muslims. In tandem, the Government is promoting the National Citizenship Register (NCR) to list valid and legal citizens of India and the National Population Register (NPR) to build a database of citizens. In an ominous development, a number of detention camps have been set up for the incarceration of those deemed to be non-citizens and to be deprived of civil rights. In the North-East state of Assam, the implementation of the National Citizen Register (NCR) has resulted in the exclusion of 1.9 million people. At prese