India’s Day of Shame

Arundhati Roy in The Wire:

Kashmir’s new Domicile Law is a cognate of India’s new blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that is supposed to detect ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ (Muslim of course) who the home minister has called ‘termites’. In the state of Assam, the NRC has already wreaked havoc. Millions have been struck off the citizens register. While many countries are dealing with a refugee crisis, the Indian government is turning citizens into refugees, fuelling a crisis of statelessness on an unimaginable scale.

The CAA, NRC and Kashmir’s new Domicile Law require even bona fide citizens to produce a set of documents approved by the state in order to be granted citizenship. (The Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazi Party in 1935 decreed that only those citizens who could provide legacy papers approved by the Third Reich were eligible for German citizenship.)

What should all this be called? A war crime? Or a crime against humanity?

And what should the collusion of institutions and the celebrations on the streets of India be called? Democracy?

More here.