India: Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, for introducing this Question. I must declare an interest: I have a column in the Indian Express every Sunday, and I have written extensively about the matters being discussed, but I shall refer people to find that out for themselves.

The noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, have raised many issues about India. I shall follow the title of the Question before us and confine myself strictly to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019. It is said that the Act is unconstitutional, but we do not know that yet because the Supreme Court of India has not yet heard on that issue. As of now, all one can say is that both Houses of the Indian Parliament have passed the legislation; the President has signed it, and it has been notified in the Gazette and is the law of the land.

It does not concern Indian citizens that the title of the legislation is somewhat misleading. After the partition of India, which led to the movement of some 18 million people one way or another—I do not remember who called the partition; I am not going to go into that—the first Citizenship Act was passed in 1955. That related to the status of refugees who had to be given citizenship in India. Although the Act that we are discussing is called the “Citizenship … Act”, it is about refugees who are not citizens and the question is which set of refugees should be given citizenship.

The first Act was in 1955; there was another in the mid-1970s, and now there is this third Act. This Act relates only to refugees who have come from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three Muslim-majority countries in the neighbourhood of India. The Act states that anybody who came into India as a refugee at any time up to 2014 and was likely to have faced prosecution will be recognised as a citizen. The position taken by the Government is that, because it was Muslim-majority countries from which they came, they will be predominantly non-Muslim—they will be Hindus, Parsis or Sikhs, but not Muslims. It is possible to say that this is not factually true, because there is a lot of persecution of Muslim minorities especially in Pakistan, where the Shias and the Ahmadis have been discriminated against, but the Government of India have chosen not to look at that and to consider only non-Muslim refugees for citizenship.

The fear about this Act, which is quite genuine and has been expressed in a number of demonstrations, arises from what has happened in Assam. It is somewhat complicated to go through it, but the Assamese position is that only people genuinely born in Assam and speaking the Assamese language can be considered Assamese, and that nobody else, Hindu or Muslim, coming from Bengal, Bihar or anywhere else, should be considered a citizen. There were major riots in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1985 the Assam Accord was signed. As part of that the Government were supposed to consider a national citizenship register, and the Supreme Court commanded the then Government to do that. But they did not do it, and 30 years later it has come up. There was a citizenship register count earlier on, and 30 million Assamese were recognised as citizens while 2 million were thought to have dubious papers and their cases will be reconsidered. It turns out that out of the 2 million, around 1 million are Hindus and the rest are Muslims and other minorities.

This episode, and the question of what will happen to those who do not have the papers, is raising anxiety. People are saying that the CAA has been passed for no other reason than to let the Hindus with dubious papers to go through but not anyone else. This has not yet happened—it is a conjectural fear. I am not saying that it is not true: the conjectural fear exists, but so far neither the citizenship Act nor the national citizenship register have been implemented. It is important for us to have that in mind. Whatever representations Her Majesty’s Government make, they should be based on what has happened so far.