India tests limits of pluralism

Religious violence sweeping India underlines the challenge confronting Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he seeks to implement contentious new “no more Muslims” citizenship laws. The laws go to the heart of India’s foundation as a secular democracy with freedom guaranteed for all religions at the time of its 1947 Partition from Muslim-majority Pakistan. For the first time, according to legislation rushed through India’s parliament, religion will be a criterion for citizenship. Being a Muslim will be a bar to becoming an Indian for untold numbers of illegal migrants who have flooded into India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh over decades.

Citizenship for migrating Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Christians and Jains will be available. But Mr Modi’s Home Minister Amit Shah has labelled illegal migrants from Bangladesh “termites” who should be thrown into the Bay of Bengal; nervousness among India’s 200 million-strong Muslim minority is understandable. They fear the new laws could be the first step by Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to make them second-class citizens. They place the citizenship laws in the context of Mr Modi’s similarly controversial move to dismantle the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, imprison local leaders and sever communications with the outside world.

Nearly 1000 intellectuals have written to Mr Modi warning “the careful exclusion of Muslims from the ambit of the bill will greatly strain the pluralistic fabric of the country”. He insists the aim of the laws is to help persecuted minorities achieve Indian citizenship. His move, however, cannot be seen in isolation from Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu hegemony underpinning the BJP, or a parallel move to create a National Register of Citizens that has seen two million of Assam’s 33 million people, many of them Muslims, disqualified. Mr Modi doubtless has good reason to bring order to citizenship rules in the world’s largest democracy. But he needs to be cautious about overplaying the Hindu religious card and show due respect for tolerance. Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru set themselves firmly against the two-nation theory of a Muslim Pakistan mirrored by a similarly intolerant Hindu India.