India: Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Earl for securing this important debate, and for his wide-ranging and empathetic introduction, balancing India’s astonishing and democratic recent history with its challenges now. It is appalling to hear that further violence has erupted today in India, with at least 11 further deaths. There seems to be no end in sight to the emerging social conflict described by the noble Lord, Lord Alton.

Hindus make up 80% of India’s population and Muslims make up almost 15%—around 200 million people. As we have heard, in December last year the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was passed, amending India’s 64 year-old citizenship law. It expedites citizenship by naturalisation for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India before 2015. Their eligibility criteria have been reduced from 11 years of residency to five, or work for the federal Government. Muslims are excluded from the CAA.

It has been suggested that the CAA is associated with India’s National Register of Citizens, the NRC, updated by Prime Minister Modi following his re-election in 2019.The NRC classified as foreigners those residents of Assam, on the Indian border with Bangladesh, who could not prove their residency there before Bangladesh declared independence in 1971. The August 2019 update to the NRC excluded 1.9 million inhabitants of Assam and placed them at risk of statelessness—not citizens of India and not accepted by Bangladesh. The Government are building detention camps in which those not listed on the NRC will be held before deportation. Prime Minister Modi has announced plans to extend the NRC across all of India. Those who are illiterate, or lack documentation, are likely to be disproportionately affected.

A 2016 government survey showed that 40% of Muslim children in India do not have a birth certificate. Only 66% of Indian women are literate, and many women have little documentation. They are also, of course, particularly vulnerable to abuse in detention camps.

Although there is no explicit link between the CAA and the NRC, it has been suggested that the CAA may assist members of the listed religions, who could, for example, claim to have come from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh, and therefore gain Indian citizenship. The reaction in India has been both alarming and, in some sense, encouraging, as the noble Lord, Lord Singh, said. But 30 people died in the first month that the CAA came into operation, more than 1,500 people have been arrested, and a further 4,000 have been detained. There have been reports of forced arrests and torture in custody.

Protesters argue that the amendment violates India’s secular constitution, by in effect turning faith into a condition of citizenship. The Government have apparently justified the exclusion of Muslims from the CAA by identifying Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan as Islamist countries that aim to convert or harass religious minorities. This would be irrelevant if the purpose was simply to admit refugees, given that certain sects are also persecuted, as the noble Lords, Lord Singh and Lord Alton, indicated. The Government have talked of millions of “infiltrators” entering India across the border, even though there was in fact a decline in India’s foreign-born population between 2001 and 2019. There was shock at an election rally in September 2018 when the Home Minister called Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh “termites” and promised to

“find each and every one and send them away.”

International observers have raised concerns. The executive director of Amnesty International India stated that the CAA and the NRC

“stand to create the biggest statelessness crisis of the world, causing immense human suffering.”

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights described the CAA as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature”. Human Rights Watch argues that the CAA

“violates India’s international legal obligations”.

Some respond by saying that India’s actions in regard to citizenship are simply an internal matter. However, we take seriously the UN’s responsibility to protect. That responsibility is a recognition that what happens within borders is not just the affair of the country in question.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, raised the CAA with his Indian counterpart in December, and that in January the issue was raised with the Indian High Commission. Could the noble Baroness tell us what the response was? What further action will the Government be taking? Have the Government raised this issue within the Commonwealth, given that the UK is the current chair? We should never accept that religious minorities should have fewer rights than others in a country, any more than this should be the case in the United Kingdom. Moreover, it should be clear that discrimination can never be a recipe for community cohesion. The Government have said that “Global Britain” will fight harder than ever before for human rights around the world. I therefore look forward to hearing what the noble Baroness says in this regard and what further actions the Government plan to take.