Across India, opposition parties, students and farmers are protesting against a sweeping revision of electoral rolls that has removed some 130 million names. They are demanding the restoration of the old voter lists and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – as the Election Commission of India (ECI) calls the exercise – requires voters to prove their eligibility, often through old documents.
Six years ago, Muslims took to the streets to warn that making citizenship dependent on such paperwork could leave millions vulnerable to exclusion, particularly Muslims. Their warnings were largely ignored. Now that the threat of exclusion extends beyond Muslims, many who ignored their warnings are taking to the streets themselves.
I am proud to see common people across India taking risks for one another in these protests. But I cannot ignore the hypocrisy in the opposition’s response: while it is right to challenge the SIR, its demands leave untouched the citizenship law against which Muslims protested in 2019 and the suspicion cast on them as “infiltrators”. Some of those now marching against the revision once opposed the 2019 protests themselves.
The question is whether this movement will challenge the discrimination Muslims warned about, or simply demand protection for those now caught in the same machinery. In December 2019, Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which fast-tracks citizenship for persecuted members of six religious communities from three Muslim-majority neighbours. Islam is the one major faith of the region it leaves out.
The danger lay in what the government planned to pair it with. That April, Amit Shah, now India’s home minister, told reporters in Kolkata, the capital of the eastern state of West Bengal, to “understand the chronology”: the citizenship bill first, a National Register of Citizens (NRC) after it. The NRC would be a nationwide register of Indian citizens, requiring people to prove their citizenship to be included.
In November 2019, he told Parliament that the NRC would be carried out across the country. Muslims understood the sequence at once. Anyone unable to prove their citizenship risked being excluded from the register.
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