You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

India’s Upper House Passes “Anti-Muslim” Citizenship Bill

HeadlineDec 12, 2019

In India, the upper house of Parliament has passed the highly controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, widely known as the “Anti-Muslim” bill. The legislation provides a path to citizenship for immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan — unless they are Muslim. The bill is part of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist agenda, and many say it’s a major step toward the official marginalization of India’s 200 million Muslims.

The Indian Union Muslim League is petitioning India’s Supreme Court to declare the bill unconstitutional. Widespread protests against the bill have swept across parts of India this week, especially in the northeast. The government has deployed the Army to the northeastern state of Assam. This is Binoy Viswam, a leader of the Communist Party of India, speaking from New Delhi.

Binoy Viswam: “Not only our party, not only the left, the whole country will oppose it, because that’s a legislation which runs against the basic content of the Constitution.”

Topics:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top