Uncovering the origins of CAA and its implications for India

On March 11, the Government of India formally notified the rules implementing the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The law provides persecuted religious minorities hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship, provided they belong to the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Parsi, or Sikh communities. Notably, the law does not provide such a pathway to those who belong to the Muslim faith.

The notification of the CAA rules—on the eve of India’s 2024 general election—has kicked off a fresh debate over the law, its implementing provisions, and the resulting implications for the future of secularism in India. On last week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, legal scholar M. Mohsin Alam Bhat joined host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the law, the rules, and the political impacts.

Bhat, a Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London, specializes in constitutional law and human rights and has written extensively about law and citizenship in India.

Asked about using religious persecution as a criterion for fast-tracked citizenship, Bhat said there’s nothing wrong with taking religion into account given it is one of the major grounds of persecution. Furthermore, India has a responsibility toward religiously persecuted minorities in its region.

However, Bhat argued, one cannot ignore the political and social context in which the CAA and the subsequent rules have been unveiled. “What India is doing is a political project, a transformation of India into a religiously, sectarian ethnic state. It is not the response of a secular, inclusive, just democratic country to address problems of religious persecution in its neighborhood, even if it’s piecemeal,” he said.

Bhat continued, “For instance, the government could have said that we’re interested in handling religious persecution, it’s a piecemeal project, there’s a current emergency in Bangladesh, and we can resettle [refugees]. But that is not what is happening here. It is part of a political project to reimagine India in a very different manner.”

On the question of the law’s constitutionality, Bhat says “critics of the law, including myself, have started arguing that the real challenge [with the CAA] is... about constitutional identity. If India is a secular country and citizenship status is fundamentally a constitutional question which relates to the very foundations of the polity, it cannot be that the test for citizenship in a secular country is a sectarian test.” Ultimately when the Supreme Court will decide this case, Bhat noted, “it will have to make up its mind about the future course of what constitutional identity of India—particularly secular identity—means.”