Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Where Modi and Trump converge

Modi's Citizenship Bill, Trump's Muslim ban will recast a multicultural nation in monocultural terms

Despite the furore it has caused, Donald Trump’s Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States executive order is in some ways not unlike Narendra Modi’s Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The immediate motive is worthy in both cases, but both measures might be inspired by long-term dreams of recasting a multicultural nation in monocultural terms. In sharp contrast, Theresa May boasted at Davos of “a truly Global Britain” that is “among the most racially diverse countries in Europe”. The numbers involved in India and the US are still too small to be significant but the idea of demographic change could be playing with fire.

 

Trump might protest that what people call his “Muslim ban” is neither a ban nor anti-Muslim since it excludes more than 40 Muslim-majority countries. But his complaint of discrimination against Christians in West Asia gave the game away. Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, defined the Republican administration’s focus more clearly by claiming it is almost impossible for a Christian refugee to escape Syria. According to Abrams, although 10 per cent of Syrians are Christian, only half of the one per cent of refugees the US admitted by 2016-end were Christian. While Trump’s controversial three-point order, which his supporters hail as correcting “the biases and injustices of the Obama administration”, bans all refugees for the next 120 days, Syrians are barred indefinitely. Citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) can’t enter the US for at least 90 days.

 

Whatever its other effects, the order does succeed in reaffirming the white Christian identity that Trump supporters say is implicit in the American Constitution’s opening “We the People …” words. It needed the grandson of a Bavarian immigrant to articulate — and even then only by implication — an aim that may not seem unreasonable to millions of Americans who didn’t even vote for Trump.

 

Modi’s Bill is similarly inspired by his personal vision of India that is Bharat, which millions of Indians call Hindustan. Introduced last year and now before a joint parliamentary committee, the Bill would enable Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians and Parsis, who have fled Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh either without valid documents or whose valid documents are now invalid, to become naturalised Indians. It’s somewhat like Israel’s Law of Return, which gives Jews worldwide the right of “return” to Israel to live and acquire Israeli citizenship. The underlying logic is that all Jews, even Malayalis, Mizos and Ethiopians, originated in the territory that is now Israel. Modi’s rationale is that India is the natural home of all Hindus of the subcontinent who have no other homeland. Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians are Hindu converts whom the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regards, not without some etymological justification, as Hindus. Parsis are courtesy Hindus for this purpose.

 

Critics of the BJP argue that Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees equality to all people. Others note that an “illegal migrant” under the 1955 Citizenship Act can be of any religion. Mohammed Salim, the Marxist member of Parliament from West Bengal, adds logically enough that a secular republic cannot peg citizenship on religion. He also claims that Pakistan’s Shias and Ahmadiyas are also persecuted minorities like liberal Muslims in Bangladesh. These objections to the Bill all have considerable theoretical merit. But in practice, both Indian and Pakistani/ Bangladeshi border guards distinguish between Hindus and Muslims fleeing to this country. Indian security personnel are reputed to demand higher bribes from Muslim refugees than from Hindus. It’s the reverse with Pakistani/Bangladeshi guards. Discrimination hinges on the tacit recognition by both groups that India is a Hindu country while Pakistan is for Muslims. That, after all, was the basis of Partition.

 

Providing sanctuary to stranded Hindus is Modi’s commendable way of tying up one of the loose ends of Partition. But increasing violence against Muslims in Europe and America warns of not allowing this hospitality to encourage vigilante groups like the Karni Sena even if Giriraj Singh rightly argues that no Indian would dare make a film on the Prophet Mohammed like Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s on Rani Padmini. If the xenophobia that has erupted even in peaceful Canada spreads to India where more than 14 per cent of the population is Muslim, it could mean worse bloodshed on a national scale than the 2002 Gujarat riots. My childhood memories of Direct Action Day 1946 are too horrendous to contemplate another communal polarisation with equanimity.