Modi’s Fall From Economic Reformer To Hate Monger

Just when the world had accepted India’s succumbing to the pressures of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to become a majoritarian state on the back of the Hindutva project, the spark of secularism in the fibre and sinew of India’s youth ignited and slammed Modi’s administration with a warning that India’s 200 million Muslims are as much part of the republic as the 80% Hindus. From calling minorities — especially the Bangladeshi Muslims — termites and vowing to throw them into the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Home Minister, Amit Shah, had overseen the crafting of a troubling series of actions to servile the identification of “illegal residents” in India. It began with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) proposal that was launched in Assam, which is India’s second-largest Muslim state after Kashmir. The NRC demanded the 33 million residents of the state to prove their Indian citizenship through authentic documentation — ta tall task that eventually led to the exclusion of 1.9 million people as non-Indian residents. Just as this large number of people was rendered stateless, the Modi administration began building detention camps. If that wasn’t enough to set the alarm bell, another project linked to the identification of citizens, the National Population Register was launched to gather demographic and biometric particulars. Following this there came another controversial statute, again linked to the identification of citizens, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).