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)

(People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism) Press Release 05.06.2019

Dr Payal Tadvi, an Adivasi Muslim from one of the most backward tribes of India committed suicide on 22 May in her hostel room in a Mumbai hospital. She was a  post-graduate resident doctor in the hospital. Many times before her suicide her mother and husband had given written representations to the  hospital authorities about the harassment she had been facing from three of her seniors. According to these complaints her harassers were using casteist abuses and publicly humiliating her. However, the hospital took no administrative actions. After her death the hospital’s anti-ragging committee has reportedly found evidence of harassment, and according to some newspaper report the police have found evidence of derogatory casteist remarks.

Dr Payal Tadvi’s suicide immediately brings to mind the suicide by Rohith Vemula in 2015, a PhD scholar at the Hyderabad Central University. Rohith was a student activist.His organisation had been protesting against the HCU administration for months before his suicide. Even ministers of the BJP central government had enquiredif his organisation had been adequately punished by the university administration after it was involved in a physical brawl with activists of the ABVP, the student organisation allied with the ruling party. If the context of Rohith’s suicide was institutional victimisation of radical dalit youth, Payal’s suicide throws  open a window to the intimate cruelties suffered by the people of deprived backgrounds every day. According to her mother when Payal moved in the hospital hostel, the only cot in the room was already taken by one of her alleged harassers. Her room-mate, also a doctor would wipe her feet on the mattress on which Payal slept.Payal was a trained doctor. She had worked in a primary health center for a year. Yet her modern professional status could not shield her from what she had to go through.She narrated incidences of her humiliation only to her immediate family members. They complained to authorities when they felt she was under serious stress. She died alone, without leaving any suicide note.

Even seventy years after independence, and a constitution that promises a life of dignity to every citizen, Dalits, adivasis, and minorities in India continue to suffer multiple humiliations in their everyday lives. Appropriate legal provisions are in place. Institutional motivation to implement these provisions is woefully lacking, as shown in  Payal’s case. However, even if institutional mechanisms were in place, these can play a role  only after a dalit or an Adivasi has been humiliated, or suffered an assault. Indians need to identify and root out the conditions which make many of them abusers and haters of  people from deprived backgrounds.

Indian society remains  a deeply hierarchical and divided society. Its public sphere, in which people are supposed to be able to interact with each other without distinctions, is also stamped with hierarchy, so that there is little respect for a human being for just being a person. The normalcy of this public is dominated by people from privileged backgrounds. People from deprived backgrounds always feel marked in this sphere. Numerous writings by Dalit and Adivasi authors bring it out in painful detail.  In educational institutions and work environments they are permanently stamped  with the ‘reservation’ category tag. Most of them are first generation learners from poor families. They  get to join these institutions and places of work after numerous hurdles, but their individual talents are little recognised. Increasingly, Muslims of our country are also being made to feel the same way.

Institutions of higher learning and government offices reek of a nefarious discourse on ‘merit’ of the ‘general’ category. This ‘merit’ is supposed to be measured by marks in entrance exams. But how does one compare the abilities of a dalit young woman from a rural landless family, who spent half her time on family chores, went to a dilapidated village school, and still got admission to an institution of higher learning, with another person whose upper middle class urban  parents gave him/her education in expensive private schools, provided comfortable learning environment at home, and paid for extra tuitions and coaching? Why should only one of them be considered ‘meritorious’? Why cannot they interact freely in an environment of  mutual respect?

The policy of reservation in jobs and educational institutions is often cited as the chief culprit, as if without this policy these places will be republics of merit.The drafting committee of India’s constitution under the leadership of Dr Ambedkar adopted reservations as a policy of affirmative action after serious debate. Reservations have been continued and extended by democratically elected governments. Citizens have a right to criticize any government policy, or law. However, no one has a right to humiliate and abuse anyone, and any effort to show these as ‘reactions’ to a state policy is pure hypocrisy. These are  acts of aggression and violence against people who are vulnerable due to their deprived backgrounds. 

PADS calls upon the people of India to seriously question why so many of them are haters and abusers of people from deprived backgrounds. Why do people who abuse and commit hate crimes  think they can get away with it? It is evident that the anti-caste movements have only partially succeeded in democratising India. The main reason is that the task of making India a democratic society has never been undertaken by the overwhelming majority of Indians. Until this happens India will continue to humiliate and harass people from deprived backgrounds, and destroy bright and sensitive men and women like Rohith and Payal.   

Released by:
Battini Rao, Convenor, PADS (95339 75195) battini.rao@gmail.com 

In spite of terrible leaders we can still hope for a better world. Here’s why.

Acceptance speech by Pervez Hoodbhoy, delivered upon receiving the honorary doctorate of law from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 29 May 2019.

I thank UBC for conferring upon me the honorary degree of Doctor of Law and congratulate all students who will receive their degrees today. In these few minutes, let me argue why you and I must actively hope for – and work toward – a better world. That’s particularly important because there’s much despondency around these days. Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Imran Khan, Tayyep Erdogan and others make thinking people very fearful of the future even as they rouse the cheers of the simple-minded. . Sigmund Freud warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”. It’s really bad news that self-possessed, egotistical and often maniacal individuals can become leaders. If allowed to act freely and promote their ideology of selfishness, technology makes it possible for them to destroy entire countries and perhaps the planet as well.

The good news is that as a species we humans tend to resist what’s wrong and are more altruistic than selfish. We can transcend and overpower the worst that’s etched into our genes – those narcissistic, selfish super-molecules that Richard Dawkins argues have self-propagation as their raison d’etre.

My friend John Avery, distinguished professor of chemistry, has written extensively on how cooperation within homo sapiens has, on average, trumped competition between them. Else today’s complex, interdependent civilization would be impossible. That means you and I are almost bound to seek ways of changing the world for the better by acting upon our beliefs and ideals, and that we have no choice but to fight against what’s wrong even if this incurs a cost. I therefore claim no credit whatsoever in having followed my instincts when challenges came my way.

Perhaps the first and most obvious challenge for me as a nuclear physicist was to fight for nuclear sanity. Even as I studied the inner workings of the atomic nucleus during my doctoral work at MIT in the mid 1970’s, I hadn’t the slightest doubt that the bomb was a monstrous abomination and an instrument of mass murder. To warn against it, and to work for Pakistan-India peace, remains of utmost importance to me. The fierce skirmishes earlier this year showed just how closely the two countries dance on the nuclear brink. That’s why activism for eliminating nuclear weapons must continue on both sides of the border.

As a practicing physicist I remain in awe of the power of equations and abstract mathematics. These produced not just the modern age but also made this infinitely varied world comprehensible via laws welded together in intricate ways. To explain physical complexity in simple terms via television, video, and public talks has been my little contribution to the youth of my country.

For me science is a wonderful Trojan horse. You all know of the giant, wooden horse with a hollow belly that the ancient Greeks built and smuggled inside the city walls of Troy. Science too is marvelously deceptive with an attractive exterior that brings us the comforts of the modern age. But hidden within this Trojan’s belly is a sharp knife that cuts through irrationality as though it were butter.

I have lived my life, and continue to work, in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. My country was born because its founding fathers assumed that Muslims and Hindus could never live together. They also assumed that Muslims could always live peacefully with other Muslims. These were hideously false assumptions with catastrophic consequences. We saw this in the tragedy of 1971 when East Pakistan bloodily separated from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh. We saw it again in the decade 2005-2015 when, by official count, 60,000 Pakistani lives were lost in a war fought by those Muslims who believe in imposing their particular version of Islam upon all others. That war is not yet over.

I am sad to see that India now seeks to emulate Pakistan and wishes to become a Hindu religious state. Just a few decades ago enlightened Pakistanis had looked wistfully across the border seeing in India a state that valued religious diversity and secularism. That is now no longer the case. The struggle to make both countries free of religious, ethnic, and class prejudices is a monumental task that coming generations of Pakistanis and Indians must take upon themselves. For us in Pakistan to escape the praetorian shadow is an

UBC honorary award lecture Vancouver, 29 May 2019 2
additional challenge. I have been fortunate in having escaped the worst but many have not. Some have fled the country while thousands of others have been “disappeared” by the authorities.

For all of you who graduate today, the message is that wherever you choose to live and whichever demons you choose to confront – whether they are war mongers, cruelly oppressive political systems, those who heedlessly add to global warming and a dirty planet, or whatever – the battle will be long and hard. I shall conclude by quoting Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University whose teach-ins I would never miss in the early 1970’s during student protests against the Vietnam War.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

You and I do have agency – free will – and are endowed with rationality by virtue of our evolutionary past. Science and scientific humanism offer us a path away from our childhood indoctrination into saluting a flag and flattening ourselves before the right god. I am confident that in the long run we shall create a universal earth-based civilization built upon reason and compassion. Until then may patience be on our side. And a steely will to fight on for as long as needed.