Protests over a new Indian citizenship law based on religion spread to student campuses after at least 100 people were wounded in weekend clashes with police at a major university in New Delhi. The Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019 in India, or the CAA protests known previously as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill protests, or the CAB protests are a series of ongoing protests in India against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 12 December 2019. The protests began in Assam, Delhi, Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura on 4 December 2019, and spread to the other parts of India. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill was cleared by the Union cabinet on 4 December 2019, and passed by both houses of the Parliament on 11 December turning the bill into an Act of the Parliament.
The protests started in Assam on 4 December 2019, after the bill was passed in parliament. Later, protests erupted in all of Northeast India, and subsequently all the major cities of India. On 15 December, police forcefully entered the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia, where protests were being held. Police used batons and tear gas on the students. More than two hundred students were injured and around hundred students were detained overnight in the Police station. The police brutality was widely criticized, and resulted in protests across the country as a response. The protests have resulted in more than a thousand arrests and six deaths. Two boys under the age of 18 were among those reported to have killed due to police firing in Assam. The Act has been criticized and termed unconstitutional by several lawyers such as Soli Sorabjee, Markandey Katju, P Chidambaram, Abhishek M Singhvi, Ashish Goel, and Suhrith Parthasarathy. Several organisations have petitioned the Supreme Court of India to declare the bill illegal.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) is an act of the Indian parliament amending the Citizenship Act of 1955 to give a path to Indian citizenship to illegal migrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, who entered India on or before 31 December 2014. The Act does not mention Muslims and does not offer the same eligibility benefits to the Muslim migrants. It also seeks to relax the requirement of residence in India for citizenship by naturalisation from 11 years to 5 years for these migrants. The Parliamentary opposition claims that the CAA ringfences Muslim identity by declaring India a welcome refuge to all other religious communities, that it seeks to legally establish Muslims as second-class citizens of India by providing preferential treatment to other groups and therefore violates Article 14 of the Indian Constitution which guarantees the fundamental right to equality to all persons.
Critics of the Act have stated that due to the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Muslims could be made stateless while the CAA would be able to shield people with Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian identity as a means of providing them with Indian citizenship if they failed to prove that they were citizens of India under the stringent requirements of the NRC. Some critics allege that it is a deliberate attempt at disenfranchising Muslims in line with the Hindutva ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The home minister Amit Shah had previously set a deadline for the implementation of a countrywide NRC by stating that the exercise would be rolled out before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The passage of the Act caused protests in India. Both Muslim and secular groups have protested, alleging religious discrimination. The people of Assam and other northeastern states continue to protest fearing that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in their regions would be allowed to stay, as many migrants from Bangladesh are Bengali Hindus. The Act directly challenges clause 5 of 1985 Assam Accord. The Act was criticized by liberal organizations across the country, with the Indian National Congress and other major political parties opposing it. The states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Punjab and Kerala have refused to implement it. Indian Union Muslim League petitioned the Supreme Court of India to declare the bill illegal.
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