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Statement denouncing Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC

South Asia Bulletin

People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism Denounces Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens

Press Release

18.12.2019

People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism strongly condemns the Citizenship Amendment Act(CAA) passed by the Parliament on Dec 11,2019. Modi government used its brute majority to force it through the Parliament, without addressing any of the concerns raised against it.  The law violates principle of secularism, which is part of the basic structure of the constitution.  Parliament has no legal authority to change constitution’s basic structure. The Act discriminates against non-believers and Muslims, as they are the only ones left out its ambit. Apologists of the BJP regime argue that this law does not affect rights of existing citizens of India, that it will grant citizenship to only those Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, and Buddhists  who have migrated from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan due to religious persecution in these countries,  and are not yet citizens. However, since it makes religion based discrimination one of the conditions of citizenship in India, it violates the secularism of the constitution. It needs to be emphasised that even after the horrendous communal violence of the Partition in 1947, when millions of people had come to India from areas which formed Pakistan, Indian laws had treated anyone who had come to India equally, irrespective of their religion and belief. This is what had distinguished India from Pakistan, which was created with the explicit purpose of providing a homeland only to Muslims. This law follows the ‘two nation’s theory’ and accepts the RSS demand that India should be a homeland for Hindus, and Hindus only. Singling out Muslims is a clear signal that their faith makes them secondary citizens in India.

It is clear that diverse groups of people face political, ethnic, linguistic and religious persecution in all countries of South Asia. Residents of Kashmir valley have been under lock down ever since article 370 was read down in August. Their political leaders are arrested and normal life is paralysed. Sikhs were massacred in India in 1984 and had faced state led persecution during the Khailistan movement. Muslims had faced large scale killings during riotsin Mumbai in 1992 after the demolition of Babri Masjid, and in Gujrat in 2002. Christians, Hindus, Ahmidiyas have faced persecution under Shariat laws of Pakistan. Shias and Hazaras too have been facing violence at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists there. Civil wars in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have led to large scale persecution of linguistic and religious minorities.Bangladeshi atheist bloggers like Avijit Roy and Ahmed Haider were killed by Islamic fundamentalists. Writer Taslima Nasreen who wrote against attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh was hounded out of the country. If  people of India want to help persecuted people in its neighbourhood, then they must treat every persecuted person equally. It is against the basic values of humanity that one kind of persecution is de-valued in comparison to other persecutions.

The actual intention behind CAA comes out clearly when it is seen along with another pet project of BJP, the National Register of Citizens. The NRC will demand every Indian to prove to the government that they are Indians. Anyone who can not prove this to the satisfaction of the government will become a stateless subject, a human being without a country. As has happened with the NRC exercise in Assam, the most immediate victims of the NRC will be the poor of all communities; daily wagers, migrant workers, farmers and adivasis living in marginal lands, who will find it difficult to get necessary documentary proofs of their citizenship. In this group of vulnerable, the most vulnerable will be poor Muslims.  Laws like the CAA will provide some relief to people of other faiths.  Given the march of India towards a Hindu Rashtra under Modi regime, poor Muslims suffer most.

Protection to persecuted minorities in other countries is not at all the purpose of CAA.Nor is the purpose of NRC to provide a life of security to Indians. Their key aim is to keep the pot of communal politics boiling in India.  The CAA and NRC are  political and ideological projects of the RSS and the BJP. Their calculation is that the CAA will create and consolidate the vote bank of Bengali speaking Hindus in Assam and West Bengal who have migrated from Bangladesh, in its favour. The jingoist nationalism around NRC will be used to target minorities, and spread hatred against progressives and liberals who oppose any exercise meant to prove to the satisfaction of the government that all Indians living in the country are indeed Indians. A key tactic of fascist politics world over is to keep the society in turmoil so that by projecting the selected group of people as threats to the majority, the latter can be consolidated behind fascism. Ever since the BJP  came to power under Modi in 2014, it has unleashed lynching mobs against Muslims and Dalits under the banner of cow protection. Students of JNU and others questioning government policies have been declared ‘anti-nationals’. Human rights activists fighting for the rights of Adivasis in central have been declared ‘urban-Naxals’.

The CAA and the threat of NRC has led to widespread protests all over the country. Modi and his minsters are trying to show to the so-called majority community that only people protesting against the CAA are Muslims. These are blatant lies. People of Assam are on streets because the CAA violates provisions of Assam Accord, which had brought a measure of peace to the state. Five people have lost life there in police firing. All political parties barring BJP’s allies have condemned the act. When students of Jamia Milia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University protested against the CAA,  police was unleashed on them The police fired teargas inside the Jamia library and attacked students studying there. It threatened women students inside their hostels. Two people are receiving treatment for bullet injuries. Police violence has galavanised students all over the country, and protests have been held in many universities. The humanity and bravery of our youth is exemplary. Viral videos of five  young women students of Jamia who stood against lathi wielding policemen mercilessly beating one of their fellow students  show the path to the future.

PADS appeals to the people of India to defeat the communal designs of the RSS and BJP. When economy is in doldrums,  youth face a dark future of unemployment, and women are not safe in our cities and villages, it is a pernicious ploy to take people’s attention away from failures of the Modi regime. 

PADS demands that attacks on students of Jamia and AMU be investigated by a judicial enquiry, and policemen and their officers responsible for these are punished.

PADS demands that CAA be repealed immediately. Laws which violate the secular spirit of the constitution are illegal and unjust.

Released by People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) on 18 Dec, 2019. by
Battini Rao, Convenor PADS (95339 75195, battini.rao@gmail.com)

Photography as Witness and Memory

Forum

KASHMIR: PHOTOGRAPHY AS WITNESS AND MEMORY

Sanjay KaK in conversation with Samir Gandesha on “Witness/Kashmir”

November 16, 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm

Room 7000 SFU Harbor Centre

515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Seven million people in Kashmir valley are under virtual imprisonment since August 5, 2019, with little freedom of movement, no communication, and the armed presence of some seven hundred thousand military, paramilitary, and police. This is the culmination of thirty years of repression. Filmmaker Sanjay Kak speaks of Kashmiri photographers as witness.

The stunning archive of images in Witness is. . .an excavation of Kashmiri public memory, of the sort that almost never gets seen outside the state… leave us in no doubt about what it is like to live and work in Kashmir—what it has been like for 30 years.

Trisha Gupta / MINT

. . .the story behind how each of the nine became witness-photographers. . . their experiences allow us to understand how in extraordinary circumstances, instead of fleeing or fighting, some of us are compelled to become storytellers.

Blessy Augustine / HINDU BUSINESSLINE

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013) about the persistence of the revolutionary ideal in India, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007) about the idea of freedom in Kashmir, and Words on Water (2002) about the struggle against the Narmada dams in central India.

In 2017 he curated, edited and published the critically acclaimed photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers, published independently under the imprint of Yaarbal books. He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (Penguin India 2011, Haymarket Books USA 2013). A self-taught filmmaker, he writes occasional political commentary, and reviews books that he is passionately engaged by. He has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India, and with the Cinema of Resistance project.

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of “Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations” (Stanford, 2012). He is coedittor with Johan Hartle of “Reification and Spectacle: On the Timeliness of Western Marxism” (University of Amsterdam Press) and of “Aesthetic Marx” (Bloomsbury Press) also co-edited with Johan Hartle.

Organized by South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) with the support of Hari Sharma Foundation, Institute for the Humanities at SFU, Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) at UBC, and Indian Summer Festival.

 Contact: Chinmoy Banerjee: cbanerjee@telus.net

https://www.facebook.com/events/1151161938407062/

Indian actions in Kasmir not internal matter

Statements/News Releases

Statement on Kashmir Indian government actions not an internal matter

A month ago, on August 5, 2019 the government of India abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution of India granting the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the part of the princely state that had conditionally acceded to India at the time of the British withdrawal from India in 1947. This came in the wake of an invasion by Pashtun tribals from Pakistan. Accordingly, Jammu and Kashmir got special status with its own constitution and flag. At one stroke in an undemocratic fiat, the government of India also separated a portion of the state, Ladakh, and imposed direct rule by central government1 on it. The remaining portion of Jammu and Kashmir was reduced to a union territory2 with the status of a municipal government. The people of Kashmir had no say in this. On the contrary, anticipating Kashmiri response to this undemocratic action, in the days leading up to the abrogation, the Indian government added tens of thousands to the six hundred thousand military and paramilitary personnel already operating in Kashmir which has a population of seven million. They imprisoned political leaders, as well as thousands of others, imposed strict curfews banning all movement and gatherings, cut off all communications — telephone, cell phone, electronic media — and silenced reportage. People have been prohibited from praying in central mosques. People are terrorized, terrified and cut off even from their neighbours. A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding with daily tragedies as people are unable to access medical care, mothers are unable to deliver babies with appropriate supports, etc. A group of Indian parliamentarians visiting to assess people’s sentiments was turned away from Srinagar3 airport on arrival. The BBC shot footage of a large demonstration after a Friday prayer, when it was allowed, with the military firing tear gas and pellet guns. The report was officially denied. The government has declared a return to normalcy while maintaining most restrictions and has opened some schools to prove its point. However, classrooms remain empty. The BBC has interviewed villagers who speak of and show visible signs of beating and torture. In response, the army has affirmed its professionalism and claims to have not received any complaints. Reports of people being blinded by pellet guns4 have been met by the governor’s declaration that shots have been fired only below the waist. 1 India has a federal system of government; Indian states have their own governments and legislative assemblies. 2 Union territories in India, unlike states in India are usually federal territories, governed directly by the central government with some exceptions such as Puducherry (Pondicherry) which have elected legislatures. Jammu and Kashmir would be in that model. In such instances ‘public order’ and ‘police’ remain under the control of the central government of India. 3 Largest city and summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. 4 Pellet guns have been routinely used in Kashmir because India calls them “non-lethal”, despite demands by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that they stop being used. They kill, blind and cause The silence of Kashmir speaks for its silenced people. The necessity of military repression speaks of the Indian government’s awareness of its status as an occupying force. By abrogating of Article 370 and dismembering and degrading Kashmir the government of India has fully and openly acknowledged its betrayal of all its promises to the people of Kashmir that they would determine their own future, a promise made before the community of nations and enshrined in Resolution 47 of the United Nations. The military occupation of Kashmir, the virtual imprisonment and silencing of its people, the undoing of a historic international commitment, cannot be accepted as an internal matter of India. We call on the United Nations to speak for the people of Kashmir. We in Canada and the US call on our governments of Canada and the USA to lead the United Nations in averting the humanitarian crisis in Kashmir and enabling the people of Kashmir to move, speak, and communicate freely.

• South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), Vancouver • South Asia Research and Resource Centre (CERAS), Montreal • International South Asia Forum (INSAF), New York • India Civil Watch (ICW-Canada) • International League of Peoples’ Struggles • Femmes de diverses origins/Women of Diverse Origins • East India Defense Committee (EIDC)’ Vancouver • Democracy, Equality and Secularism in South Asia (DESSA), Winnipeg • Punjabi Literary and Cultural Association, Winnipeg • Movement Against Rape and Incest • South Asian Women’s Community Centre (SAWCC) • Quebec Women’s Federation (FFQ)

multiple injuries. A Government Medical College, Kashmir study reported large scale blindings and psychiatric problem resulting from their use.

The use and Abuse of Identity

SANSAD Events

The Use and Abuse of Identity for (Public) Life

 A discussion with Samir Gandesha

August 17, 2019

2.00 pm – 4.00 pm

7000 SFU Harbor Centre

515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

The question of identity has become urgent for activism in the West though the issue has been important in many other parts of the world as well in a variety of forms.

Political Identities form in opposition to oppression (or, reactively, as perceived victimization) and demand recognition, rights, and equity (or aggressively promote their denial). They also divide, become separated in privilege, get co-opted, and become instruments of domination. Can identity struggles lead to fundamental social transformation or must they necessarily be limited to the horizon of recognition and reform? Can the empowerment of identity be woven into solidarity or must it necessarily be doomed to fragmentation and the sustenance of the status quo?

Samir Gandesha’s introductory lecture and discussion, from 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm will be open to all. Following a short break there will be a more focused discussion with a limited group of 25 preregistered participants.  

To register RSVP Chinmoy Banerjee, cbanerjee@telus.net.

Organized by South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) and the Institute for the Humanities, SFU.