India Protests Spread as Anger Against Citizenship Law Grows

Tensions remained high across India Monday after five days of protests against a contentious new religion-based citizenship law turned violent in the capital New Delhi and other parts of the country, with police using tear gas to disperse crowds. #IndiaProtests

Anger against the law has fueled protests across Asia’s third-largest economy, from Assam, about 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) to the east of Delhi, to demonstrations in Bengaluru and the financial capital Mumbai.

The agitation in Assam prompted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was scheduled to visit the state, to delay a three-day trip that was set to begin on Sunday.

Authorities shut down internet access in some districts in Assam -- which borders Bangladesh -- and Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal as protesters defied police to take to the streets against the Citizenship Amendment Law.

Passed Wednesday, it bars undocumented Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan from seeking citizenship but allows undocumented Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from these regions to do so.

The U.S. was closely following developments, a State Department spokesperson said before the bill became law, urging India to “protect the rights of its religious minorities in keeping with India’s Constitution and democratic values,” while the United Nations described the legislation as “fundamentally discriminatory.”

The law was attracting criticisms outside India both due to its content, but also because it follows the government’s decision to abrogate Kashmir’s special autonomous status and a court decision over a site that’s sacred to both Hindus and Muslims, said Ian Hall, professor of international relations at the Griffith Asia Institute at the Queensland-based Griffith University. “Put together, this looks to many as a shift towards a far less liberal, Hindu majoritarian India in which Muslims are second class citizens,” Hall said by email Monday.

The new law is seen as a precursor to Modi’s Hindu nationalist government plan to implement a citizenship drive nationwide to weed out undocumented migrants. Assam was the first state to implement the register. The process has put about 1.9 million people at risk of becoming stateless and raised concerns about the whittling away of values laid out in the secular constitution of the world’s second-most populous nation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi defended the law at a campaign rally in Jharkhand state over the weekend and implied it was only Muslims who were behind the protests on campuses across several parts of India.

“These people who are lighting these fires, the images of them that you see on TV. You can tell who these people setting fires are by their clothes,” Modi said referring to Muslim students in hijab and other Islamic clothing who were part of the protests.

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