Justice S.R. Sen's provoking statement that India should have been affirmed a Hindu country in 1947 and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government should save the nation led to the tired and expected nationalism vs. secularism debate again.
There is a political awareness that the divider benefited the Muslims of South Asia. They recognized a Muslim preponderance Islamic state and protected special rights in secular India. But Hindus did not get a Hindu Rashtra and they are offended in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Does the secular stipulation of Indian citizenship disagree with the interests of Hindus?
BJP leaders described Justice S.R. Sen's remarks as an expression of national anxiety.
The 'natural right' of Hindus to become Indian citizens is one of the most controversial political issues since 1947.
The formation of Pakistan on a religious basis and successive journey of communities across the borders forced many members of India's ingredient congregation to demand that Hindus and Sikhs should be given unconditional Indian citizenship. Dr P.S. Deshmukh argued.
"If the Muslims want an limited place for themselves called Pakistan, why should not Hindus and Sikhs have India as their residence? We are not debarring others from getting nationality here. We merely say that we have no other country to look to for acquiring citizenship rights… so long as we follow the respective religions, should have the right of citizenship in India ….I do not think this claim is in any way non-secular or secretarian or mutual."
This line of quarrel did not survive and the ingredient congregation lastly adopted a secular description of nationality. Terms like Hindu, Muslim and Sikh were replaced by overtly secular categories. Even the habitually used expression 'Hindu/Sikh refugees' was deliberately disqualified in the final version of the establishment and the persons who were coming from Pakistan were described as 'migrants'.
These worldly principles of citizenship imagine a crucial difference between the given, and somewhat fixed, spiritual cultural identity of an individual and his/her formal relationship with the state as a citizen. In this sense, an attempt was made to replace a everlasting collective popular based on Hindu/Muslim feature with what B.R. Ambedkar calls a following majority-based on rational worldly principles.
It did not mean that this secular beginning of citizenship ignored the plight of refugee communities or minorities who stayed back in India and Pakistan after 1947. The famous Nehru-Liaquat pact of 1950 is an example. Both the governments agreed to give citizenship rights to all community and to protect the interests of minorities, irrespective of religion. These principles of secular nationality in India were also followed in the research of the National Citizenship Register (NCR) in 1951.
Jawaharlal Nehru re-imagined the so-called Hindu welfare and productively launches an enormous and explicitly secular treatment programme for cooperative migrant populations into the nation-building process.
Pakistan establishment refused to take Muslim migrants from India in later years. The 'permit system' introduce right away after divider slowly evolve into the passport system. In fact, Pakistan did not consign itself to grant citizenship to all Muslims of South Asia. The migrant Muslim inhabitants were actually seen as an economic and social problem.
This policy sustained even after 1956 when Pakistan was formally affirmed an Islamic state. It did not offer nationality to any person only on the foundation of his/her Islamic identity. Bangladesh also followed similar values of nationality. It also does not give any favorite to Indian Muslims.
The Muslim citizens of India have to get a visa to visit Pakistan or Bangladesh. There is no official stipulation that allows them unlimited access to these countries. The quarrel that Pakistan/Bangladesh is a 'Muslim homeland', therefore, is entirely ambiguous.
The Citizenship (adjustment) Bill 2016 seems to have reopened the debate about the 'natural rights of Hindus on Indian citizenship'. This bill aims to offer unqualified Indian nationality to non-Muslim minorities of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Although this bill does not completely talk about the 'Hindu interests', an implicit orientation to Muslims is clearly made in it. The targeted countries are Muslim-majority states; and the community that are defined as migrant 'minorities' are also non-Muslims.
The bill has been referred to the Joint Parliamentary Committee, which is hypothetical to inspect a very delicate question: Should the religion of a person be treated as a criterion for India citizenship?
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are not Muslim homelands. These European-style nation-states recognized Islam as their national religion, and do not take responsibility of Muslim minorities.
India, which has posed a serious challenge to the idea of European nation-state model, is sarcastically in danger of differing from its exclusively designed secular beginning of citizenship in the name of 'Hindu interests'.
Hilal Ahmed is a scholar of political Islam and connects professor at Center for the Study of Developing Societies.
