MUMBAI—In a nondescript office located in the heart of a Muslim neighborhood in south Mumbai, lawyer Nadeem Siddiqui examines the papers sprawled on his desk. A flyer on one of the walls reads, “My document, my identity.” Across him, Muslim men and women stand in line, waiting fretfully for a chance to get their documents corrected.
The rush of panicked clients is a response to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a bill passed in 2019 but which has now become a reality. Supporters of the law say it will stop the influx of migrants illegally entering into India and ensure so-called homecoming for persecuted Hindus from India’s neighboring countries; critics call it “anti-Muslim” and “unconstitutional.”
Among many Indian Muslims, it has sparked deep fears of their place under an increasingly hostile government. On April 21, in an election rally during India’s general elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi branded Muslims as “infiltrators” who would take India’s wealth. He increasingly resorted to anti-Muslim rhetoric during the election campaign before becoming the Indian Prime Minister for a rare third term.
The CAA provides a route to citizenship to members of six religious minority communities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—but not Muslims. In December 2019, when the bill was signed into law, protests erupted across the country, leading to the deaths of at least 31 people and leaving thousands in police detention. The protests were also a reaction to the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—a supposedly definitive list of citizens that, its advocates say, will identify legitimate citizens of India and deport migrants living illegally in the country.
“In the past two years, I’ve helped over 40,000 Muslims correct their documents,” said Siddiqui, who has been working on a pro bono basis to help people produce the paperwork they need to claim citizenship. On a regular day, the lawyer would have about 60 Muslims visit his office, but in the two months leading to the introduction of the CAA again this year,, “the number of walk-in visitors doubled to about 135 a day,” he said.
Critics argue that the CAA, which has now been slammed by the United Nations and Amnesty International, becomes problematic when read together with the impending NRC. Together, the laws can be used to exclude, or even expel, Muslims. Members of other religious communities who fall foul of the NRC have the shield of the CAA, allowing them a route to stay if the NRC brands them “illegal.” Muslims have no such respite.
The government announced the implementation of the CAA in March, mere weeks before India’s general elections began. Critics called the move a “calculated manoeuvre” aimed at reshaping the electoral landscape and consolidating Modi’s image as the epitome of Hindu leadership. Modi’s government, meanwhile, framed the CAA as “justice for persecuted Hindus” and tried to avoid mention or connection to the NRC.
The citizenship law is a reflection of the majoritarian ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “Bringing the CAA into force, in light of previous statements about weeding out so-called infiltrators, is thus likely to cause extreme unease among Indian Muslims,” she said.
The northeastern Indian state of Assam is the only state to have an NRC, first prepared in 1951 and updated in 2019. Thirty-three million residents of Assam had to substantiate their citizenship through documents, proving that they or their ancestors came to India before neighboring Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971. The final list, published in August 2019, left 1.9 million people out. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom subsequently alleged that the Assam NRC was a tool to “target religious minorities and, in particular, to render Indian Muslims stateless.”
Because of the developments in Assam, Zakia Soman, the founder of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a nationwide rights organization for Muslims, said the fears among India’s 200 million Muslims are warranted, as thousands of bona fide citizens ended up in Assam’s detention camps following the NRC exercise in the state. Describing the CAA as “discriminatory,” she said there is a whole lot of onslaught on Muslims in India already and that “now this will be made, as and when it is convenient, into one more tool in the hands of hatemongers.”
Soman said that while the repercussions of the CAA-NRC might not be felt immediately, “we have seen the kind of harassment and targeting of Muslim communities everywhere.” She cited an instance from the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand earlier this year, where large-scale violence broke out after hundreds of police and civic officials razed an Islamic school and a mosque they claimed was “illegally built.”
“So if you go and you demolish the madrassa, then the people resist, then there is police firing in which five people are killed, and then there are arrests. So all of this happens only to one community. The dead are also from the same community. Those homes which are demolished are also from the same community. Those who are arrested are also from the same community,” she said.
The fear is powerful. Under Modi’s government, the discrimination against India’s Muslims has been visible in legislative processes as well as law enforcement, with a spate of mob lynchings and vigilante violence against the community on the pretext of cow protection, “love jihad,” and other accusations. The U.S. State Department, in its 2023 country report on human rights in India, flagged instances of such violence against minorities in India, documenting “credible reports of militant groups killing Muslims and Dalits for transporting or slaughtering cattle.”
Muslims such as 70-year-old Yusuf Kalani, a resident of Mumbai who I met at Siddiqui’s office in March, appeared hesitant when confronted with questions about the citizenship law. He said Muslims are not afraid of the CAA but that “the times and the situation that is today … mob lynching and this and that and the troubles people are facing … to save themselves from those troubles, people are getting their documents ready.”
In Mumbra, a town in the Thane district of western India, where 85 percent of the population is Muslim, people shared similar fears. Kausar Ansari, who works as a counselor with the NGO Awaaz-e-Niswan in the region, said that after the developments around the CAA this year, several people have approached her, worried over the fate that awaits them. She believes that the CAA is a precursor to the NRC.
“Muslims are scared because we’re watching Assam, what’s happening to Assami Muslims, even what’s happening to Hindus there. They’re being put into detention despite having all the papers, so how would a common Muslim not be afraid?” she said.
Siddiqui has been holding meetings every Sunday to raise awareness about how urgent the documents issue is. Muslims from all over Maharashtra visit him to seek help. “I tell them that if they have their documents in place, they needn’t fear CAA or NRC,” he said.
But getting the paperwork in order isn’t easy. Discrepancies in the spelling of names and ages, missing papers, and the inability to file legal claims owing to poverty and illiteracy led to the exclusion of almost 2 million people in the Assam NRC—a verification process that Amnesty International called “shoddy and lackadaisical” and ripe for abuse in targeting minorities.
Siddiqui said looking at his own documents showed him how tricky it could be. “The four or five documents I had, I never compared them. I realized that my first name, Nadeem, was spelled as ‘Nadim’ in some of the documents, while my father’s name ‘Mohammed’ was spelt correctly in one document, one had ‘Md,’ while another had ‘Mohd.’ I realized that we never paid attention to these small mistakes,” he said.
The lawyer then started the process of correcting his own documents, which took him about three months. “It’s a cumbersome process. Every document takes 10 to 15 days; they ask for this paper, then that. That’s when I realized that despite being educated, a lawyer, it took me three months to correct my documents. So many in India are illiterate. What will happen of them?”
The expense of getting documents made and corrected also alarmed him. “In Assam, people spent 10,000 rupees [about $120] on making one document, a document that won’t have an official fee [of] more than 50 rupees [60 cents],” Siddiqui said. “So with this, the rich won’t face any problems, but the poor will be trapped.”
Ansari agrees, stating that agents in her locality charge a minimum of 500 to 1,000 rupees (about $6 to $12) to prepare one document. Muslims are the poorest religious group in India, and even these seemingly small fees are a burden. Government bureaucracy imposes other costs. “If you go to a government office, there are very long queues. There are no facilities either. So many times, their servers are down,” Ansari said.
The literacy rates among the Muslim community are the lowest in India, which also acts as a barrier to correcting or getting documents issued online. Irshad Khan, a 56-year-old security guard who was waiting at Siddiqui’s office to get his passport made, said he’s aware that the passport application process is online but that he isn’t educated enough to initiate or complete the process online.
“At the government office, you’ve to queue up for everything. But with [Siddiqui], he’ll see all the documents, and he’ll tell us what’s missing. If he can do it, he’ll do it himself, or he’ll point us to where it can be done. He’ll show the way; the government doesn’t show the way,” Khan said.
Ansari, however, feels that even having documents does not guarantee protection from the citizenship law. “The people in Assam, even they had all their documents. But they are still going through all that they are,” she said. “I feel that if the government has decided to do something … you can’t go against the government. Whoever raises their voice against them, they know how to snub it.”
Sayyed Alim, an 80-year-old in Mumbai’s Nagpada neighborhood, echoed the thought. He said he isn’t afraid of the CAA or NRC because he has his documents in place. “But if something goes wrong despite having documents, what can we do? I feel that is possible because we see what’s happening in the country.”
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