India’s Citizenship Amendment Act Isn’t Controversial

India has the sovereign right to fast-track citizenship for any category of people that it wants exactly as Russia has done for native speakers from the former Soviet Union and most recently all Ukrainians after earlier only allowing this for Ukraine’s former Donbass residents.

Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah announced that the country will begin implementing the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which allows illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who entered the country before 2015 to receive fast-tracked citizenship if they fled religious persecution. It specifically applies to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, not any Muslim denominations, which is why some critics have lambasted the CAA as “Islamophobic”.

The problem with that description is that it simply isn’t true and only serves to create a false scandal where there otherwise wouldn’t be one. India has the sovereign right to fast-track citizenship for any category of people that it wants exactly as Russia has done for native speakers from the former Soviet Union and most recently all Ukrainians after earlier only allowing this for Ukraine’s former Donbass residents. There’s nothing discriminatory about this approach in either case.

Observers should also remember that India has over 200 million Muslims and is therefore the third-largest Muslim country in the world so it would be irrational for the authorities to discriminate against one-fifth of a billion people with all the Hybrid War consequences that such a move could easily provoke. Nevertheless, some Indian Muslims still consider the CAA to be “Islamophobic”, but that’s the result of the leftist-aligned liberal-globalist opposition manipulating their perceptions for electioneering reasons.

Moving along, a supplementary criticism that’s been made about this law is that it’ll be the first time that religion becomes one of the possible criteria for Indian citizenship, which some claim is supposed proof that India is becoming a “Hindu nationalist” state at the expense of Muslims. India is still constitutionally secular, however, so this is an exaggerated concern. Moreover, it’s hypocritical for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to criticize this move when they all have an official state religion.

The last point to make is that India has the same right as Russia does as a civilization-states to draw special attention in any respect to the role played by its historical state-forming people. Russia’s 2020 constitutional amendments codified Russian as the “language of the state-forming people” per President Putin’s advice while the CAA gives fast-tracked citizenship to Hindu illegal immigrants (among others) who fled South Asia’s Muslim-majority countries due to persecution per Prime Minister Modi’s advice.

While it’s true that the Mongols played a role in forming the Russian state during their several centuries of rule under the Golden Horde just like Muslims played vis-à-vis the Indian one during the Mughal Empire’s similar rule, Russians’ and Hindus’ roles were historically much longer and greater. The cosmopolitan modern-day states that they inherited are reinterpreting their history in different ways, but they share the common denominator of not forgetting the contributions of the aforementioned people.

Accordingly, just like the Russian language is constitutionally recognized per the 2020 amendments as the “language of the state-forming people” and one of the criteria for fast-tracked citizenship, so too is the Hindu faith now constitutionally recognized among others as one of the same criteria in specific cases. Therefore, the brouhaha over both is based on false premises, manipulated perceptions, and foreign meddling, with Russia and India’s spiritually similar amendments being equally legitimate.