Anti-CAB Virulence Is A Manifestation Of Warped Secularism And Hinduphobia

If anyone needs a live demonstration of the extreme perversity of Indian secularism, one needs to look no further than how media and political debates on the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) have been framed.

You need to be extremely obtuse to brand as discriminatory a law that actually maintains the status quo for granting citizenship to illegal Muslim migrants from three Islamic neighbours. This, when all that CAB does is fast-track citizenship to those who have faced the brunt of Islamic persecution for nearly seven decades.

Our liberalism must be extremely warped for all our “liberals” and the global media to condemn CAB with one voice, by completely ignoring the intent and content of the bill and reading only its assumed subtext of targeting people who are not persecuted at all. (Read the tweets, articles and statements of assorted domestic, global and civil society groups and politicians here, here, here, here, here and here to gauge the manufactured hysteria over CAB).

Nothing can be more ridiculous than the protest of the United States Council for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an evangelical busybody committed to spreading Christianity to non-Christian peoples, to decry an effort to support the victims of religious bigotry in India’s neighbourhood as an act of religious discrimination. It must be a joke for the Indian public to hear Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan decry CAB as violative of “all norms of international human rights law and bilateral agreements with Pakistan”. One wonders which sliver of human rights and bilateral agreements – from the Shimla agreement to the Lahore accord – Pakistan has ever respected.

The trophy for utter lunacy goes to Harsh Mander, a former bureaucrat with strongly Hinduphobic leanings and whose non-governmental organisation (NGO) is funded by evangelical groups. Mander threatened to declare himself a Muslim if CAB is passed. For a man who has never made an issue of the torments faced by millions of persecuted Hindus in our neighbourhood, this statement cannot be read as anything but deranged. Maybe, he should have declared himself a Muslim long ago, so that there is scriptural support to persecute Hindus in India, too.

Again, it must be an extreme act of wilful blindness, when tell-tale data on the steady diminution of Hindu (and Indic) populations in the three Islamic countries is completely ignored and a meagre effort to protect them in plural India is deemed to be Islamophobic.

The data show that Hindu populations in Bangladesh have fallen from 21-22 per cent in 1951 to around 8 per cent now, in Pakistan from 15 per cent to just 1.5 per cent, and in Afghanistan from a few lakhs to just around 7,000 now. The discussions are seldom about this dwindling number, which could not have happened without violence, intimidation, forced conversions, and organised ethnic cleansing, but the alleged violation of the right to non-discrimination guaranteed under Article 14 of our Constitution.

If CAB is a violation of the right to equality, we should equally conclude that able-bodied men should be allowed to compete in a race for paraplegics, or that Dalits should not be given reservations in jobs and educational institutions since this would be discrimination against the privileged, too.

You have to be extremely naive or daft, or both, if you think the violence against Shias and Ahmaddiyas in Afghanistan and Pakistan needs to be placed on the same footing as atrocities against religious minorities in those countries. Shias and Ahmaddiyas were not only at the forefront of the demand for Pakistan in pre-independence India, but even today they want to live in an Islamic state. Their only problem with the Sunnis who rule Pakistan is that the latter wants its version of Islam to be the victor, not other sects following different creeds and dogmas of Islam.

The persecution of one Islamist by another does not deserve the same compassion as the persecution of Hindus, who are constitutionally declared second-class citizens in the three states that CAB deals with. Battles for supremacy within Islam must be fought within the territories that Islamists already control. India does not need to make things worse for itself by inviting Islamists to India just because other Islamists are persecuting them. Their battle is for Islam, not secularisation of Islamic countries.

The last incongruity is for the media to see the different protests against CAB as one and the same thing. The protests in the North-East are against giving citizenship to any Bangladeshi, Hindu or Muslim, which is an extreme form of xenophobia driven by (partly real) demographic fears. These fears are being addressed outside CAB, and the protests can be handled with empathy. The protests that make no sense are those that demand that persecuted people must be treated as badly, or non-persecuted people as well as persecuted people, in the matter of granting citizenship.

This is a seminal moment for Hindus to realise what they are up against. The partnership of Hinduphobic domestic liberals with global evangelical and jihadi groups is now out in the open. This partnership of evil will not be happy until Hinduism is destroyed from within, until most Hindus are converted or killed, and a small minority left as museum pieces in autonomous reserve areas like the American Indians in the US. Any form of assertion by Hindus, whether on Article 370 or Ram Mandir or CAB, is intolerable to them. Which is why India itself is called intolerant.

Let’s be clear: this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black; it is a case of black calling light grey as black. When it comes to peddling vicious ideologies in the name of secularism, truth and facts do not matter to alliance of the global Left, Islamo-fascists, and evangelical groups.