CAA, the Muslim angle and the elephant in the room

The CAA and the related protests are just a manifestation of a bigger problem pertaining to Muslims and their obsession with changing the entire world into a monotheistic religion.

The troublemakers have been interpreting the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), or rather, twisting, according to their own convenience, but basically, what it intends to achieve is, fast track the process of granting citizenship to minorities of three neighboring, countries of India, including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

I’m not writing this post to explain the pros and cons of the CAA and I fully understand that the ongoing troubles on the streets are nothing but anti-BJP political parties and individuals salivating at the prospect of mobilising a groundswell against the BJP by fear mongering.

They’re not worried about minorities.

They simply want to barbecue their nuggets of hatred for the BJP on the burning fire of communal turmoil.

What is CAA?

As mentioned above, CAA is to help people become citizens of India who have been victims of religious persecution in three Islamic countries, namely, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The CAA doesn’t refer to people continuously coming to India.

It refers to refugees that have come to India before 2014.

These people are already here.

The CAA is applicable to minorities in these countries who are targeted, tormented and persecuted because of their religions.

The religious minorities of these countries include Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Christians.

When people belonging to these religious minorities flee their countries to escape from religious persecution they seek asylum in India not just because it is the nearest, non-hostile country, but also the only country that has a close relationship with these religions.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were born in this country (Sikhism mostly in the areas now gone to Pakistan and Afghanistan).

According to Wikipedia, there are 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world and 45 countries that have declared Islam as their state religion, including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Although there are many countries in the world with 40–80% population that identifies itself as Hindu (in India there are 79.80% Hindus and in Nepal, 81%) no country in the world has Hinduism as its state religion.

In South Asia, all Muslim countries are Islamic.

In all these countries, minorities face persecution in the form of forced religious conversion, limited property rights, no avenues for cultural and social growth, limited options for education, and curtailed legal rights.

Every day you come across news of some Hindu or a Sikh or a Christian girl kidnapped, raped and then converted.

Many asylum seekers say that they had just gone to the market and when they came back, one of their Muslim neighbors had occupied their ancestral home and neither police nor courts helped.

Within a span of a few minutes, they were rendered homeless.

People belonging to these minorities are randomly picked and then given a choice to either die or embrace Islam.

So far, these asylum seekers, or refugees, have been living in India for decades, in miserable conditions.

They don’t have any rights because they are not recognized as citizens of the country.

They don’t get any privileges that are available to the citizens of the country.

The Congress-ruled state like Rajasthan was even on the verge of sending them back to Pakistan to prove how secular and non-partisan the party is.

Left-liberal intellectuals and their political bosses have been saying that since these refugees, whether they are Hindus or not, are aliens and hence, must be sent back.

Giving them citizenship because of the Hindu religion would be an assault on the secular credentials of the country, is often their diabolic view.

It was in the BJP’s manifesto that if the party came to power, it would expedite the process of granting citizenship to the religiously persecuted minorities of the three neighboring Islamic countries.

Normally it takes 1+11 years for refugees to get citizenship.

Under the new act, they will get citizenship in 1+5 years.

The bone of contention is, why Muslims have been excluded in the CAA?

Muslims like Ahmediyas, Baloch and Rohingyas are also persecuted.

What is the misinformation that is being floated about the CAA?

The argument being floated is that this act is biased against Muslim citizens of the country.

Article 14 of the Constitution mandates that every citizen, irrespective of his or her religion, caste or sex, must be treated equally by the law of the land.

So, the people who oppose the CAA say that the Act goes against the spirit of Article 14.

Ultimately, they claim that this act will be used in combination with the NRC (National Register for Citizens of India) to target Muslims in the country.

The purpose of the NRC is to identify illegal immigrants, especially from Bangladesh and Myanmar who are wrecking havoc in the country, and from Pakistan, who enter the country for terrorist activities.

It is not the fault of the NRC that most of the illegal immigrants coming from the neighboring countries are Muslims.

Since NRC can be used to declare whether someone is a legitimate citizen of the country or not, there are certain requirements, certain documents, that are needed to be submitted.

Identification of the ancestry will be needed to establish one’s citizenship.

Being a backward and poor country, and a lackadaisical attitude among the people, documentation isn’t an administrative forte in India.

Parents and grandparents who were born before the 70s, 60s and 50s, may not have documentation.

They have just been living in the country since time immemorial.

Hence, they will not be able to prove their ancestry.

This may include anyone whether the person is a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim or belonging to any other religion or sub-religion.

The confusion, which is mostly politically motivated, is that, Muslim people, whether they can prove their ancestry or not, and can show their documents or not, due to CAA, will be rendered vulnerable.

Because of CAA, since Muslims are not included in it, they may lose their citizenship if they cannot prove their ancestry and cannot show their documents.

Troublemakers have been spreading rumors that in the absence of any proof, the genuine Muslim citizens of the country will be packed off to concentration-camp-like locations.

The Muslim citizens, if they are unable to come up with ancestral documents, will lose their voting rights and their privileges as the citizens of the country.

In this pell-mell, what is being conveniently ignored is the fact that the CAA particularly deals with religious minorities of three Islamic countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh) where minorities are subjected to religious persecution.

Repeated: CAA is applicable to only those people who have become refugees because they have been religiously persecuted in the neighboring Islamic countries.

Muslims don’t face religious persecution in Muslim countries.

Of course there may be different sects that are constantly inflicting inhuman miseries upon each other, but they are not religious minorities.

The following falsities are being peddled as the CAA being anti-Muslim:

1. Muslims have been excluded from the list of refugees that can be granted easier citizenship and hence, the government is acting against the secular credentials of the country.
2. The Act will be used to target Muslim citizens of the country and throw them in concentration camps.

The reality is:

1. The CAA is applicable to only the religious minorities living in the three Islamic countries around India where these religious minorities are persecuted because of their religion.
2. The CAA is for granting citizenship, not for taking it away.

Hence, there are two preconditions for the applicability of the CAA:

1. One belongs to a religious minority in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
2. One is persecuted because of his or her minority-status religion and he or she is seeking asylum/citizenship in India.

Can the CAA, when combined with NRC, be used to target Muslim citizens of India?

First of all, people who say that the NRC can be combined with the CAA are lying because no NRC document is yet available soon and hence, haven’t even read it yet.

Frankly, every law can be used to target any citizen of the country.

The dowry act is misused.

The SC/ST act is misused.

The RTE is misused.

The democracy itself is misused.

If there is a privilege or a provision, it is prone to be misused.

I will give you a small example:

Today my maid told me that his daughter’s father-in-law who runs a small fruit and vegetable stall by the roadside has been arrested by the police.

A Muslim customer came and wanted to pay a lot less for 1 kg apples.

When the father-in-law refused, the Muslim customer went to the police and filed a false case against the father-in-law of stealing his bike.

Why am I mentioning that the customer was a Muslim (he was actually Muslim)?

Just to clarify the fact that our laws are such that, that a person from any community can get a person from another community in trouble using one or another loophole in the law.

Right now NRC is applicable just in Assam because infiltrators from Bangladesh are swarming all over the state.

They have completely altered the demography, the culture, and even the flora and fauna of the state.

Call me an Islamophobe, but I won’t hesitate from saying that the the Muslim community, due to whatever reasons, proliferates fast.

The same has been happening in the state of Assam.

The entire state is in a dire situation and hence, the NRC has been applied there on priority basis.

Why the NRC cannot be combined with CAA to harass citizens of the country is because the CAA is a one-time affair.

It is to expedite the granting of citizenship to refugees who have fled from the neighboring Islamic countries, especially those who have borne religious persecution.

There are three keywords/phrases that define CAA:

1. Religious minorities.
2. In three Islamic countries — Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
3. Subjected to religious persecution.

After the Second World War, Jews were given special treatment when granting citizenship in the USA.

Was then the USA being biased against other communities or was it the need of the hour.

Every Jew in the world can come to Israel.

Now, people may have a problem with the fact that why Muslims are being excluded, but then again, the CAA is specifically for minority-religion communities who are being subjected to religious persecution in Islamic countries.

If there is a problem that Muslims are not being treated specially, then instead of protesting against the CAA, maybe they can demand another bill that creates some sort of provision to allow persecuted Muslims from other countries to get the Indian citizenship.

Now the elephant in the room

The elephant in the room is the rapid Islamisation of the region.

Even the left liberals who oppose the CAA because it excludes Muslims from the three Islamic countries would never like to live in an Islamic country, especially in a country like Pakistan or Afghanistan.

In 1947 the population of Hindus in (West) Pakistan was around 14% (source) and now it is around 1.6% (1991, current figures are not available).

Here is a graphic from the above sourced link:

One thing very few people take note of (the author of the sourced link has) is that while in 1941 the region of West Pakistan had a population of 14% of Hindus, by 1951, it declined to 1.3%.

Obviously, this decline happened due to partition-related migration and mass killings of Hindus on the Pakistani side (of course, the reciprocal killings happened on the Indian side too).

Ever since 1951, the percentage of Hindus in Pakistan has hovered around 1.3–1.6%.

For the argument’s sake one can say that the population of Hindus in Pakistan has increased.

The population of Hindus in Bangladesh has been declining too, although the condition in Bangladesh is not as bad as in Pakistan.

Contrast this with the growth of Muslims just in the state of Uttar Pradesh (graphic taken from the same above sourced link)

By 2001, almost 18.50% population in Uttar Pradesh was Muslim, a growth of almost 4% since 1951.

The difference may not seem significant, but it is growth nonetheless.

In 1951, Hindus were 84.1% and Muslims 9.8%.

According to the Census of India website, by 2001, there were 80.5% Hindus and 13.4% Muslims.

By 2011 census, Hindus came down to 79.80% and Muslims rose to 14.23%.

Whereas the Hindu population has come down by more than 5%, the Muslim population has gone up by almost 5% since 1951.

If this trend continues, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may live in a highly Islamized country if not an entirely Islamic country.

In case you have a problem with this train of thought, remember that Kashmiri separatists, Kashmiri politicians and activists and intellectuals who are opposed to actions like the abrogation of Article 370, fear that the Muslim-majority demography of the Kashmir Valley will be endangered if people from the rest of the country come and settle there.

All the bleeding hearts don’t have even a single tear to shed for Kashmiri pundits who were subjected to a genocide and were forced to live in their own country as refugees, but they have a problem with the so-called demography being altered.

So, why shouldn’t I worry about my country becoming a prominently Muslim country and my future generations forced to live lives of fear, intimidation and possible conversion?

States like Kerala, West Bengal and Assam are already on the verge of becoming Muslim-majority states.

Elephant in the room:

Islam is not just any other religion.

Along with following a way of life, its adherents also want to force others to follow their way of life.

This is the crux of the problem.

Now, if another religion becomes a majority, for example Budhhism, Jainism, Sikhism, or even Christianity (considering the conversion industry, this may too happen) there is nothing to get alarmed about.

Muslim countries don’t have a good human rights records, especially for religious communities.

This is the reason why there is a worldwide refugee crisis.

Why don’t people go from other countries to Islamic countries?

Even Muslims don’t go to other Islamic countries and instead, they go to Europe and countries like India where they find acceptance and accommodation and they are free enough to protest, sometimes even to the extent of physically attacking the locals, if they don’t get the facilities they expect to get in their host countries.

They would rather drown themselves in the ocean then go back to their own countries.

Why is it always people living in Islamic countries who are going to other countries?

Why is it that these days when you think of a refugee, there’s a great chance that he or she is going to be a Muslim?

What’s wrong in these Muslim-countries?

Why don’t people leave India (even Muslims) and go to Pakistan, Afghanistan or even Bangladesh because they want to live in freer and more inclusive societies?

Have you ever heard someone telling you, “Oh, I’m moving to Pakistan because there are better opportunities there.”

The only reason why people want to move to countries like Pakistan and Syria is because they want to become terrorists.

You may say that hundreds of thousands of Indians (even non-Muslims) go to Gulf countries.

Yes, they go there because among local populations these Gulf countries cannot find labor and qualified professionals.

They couldn’t have possibly built mega structures Burj Khalifa with local engineers, architects and construction workers.

Professionals from Germany, America, England, Australia, India and China, they all go to these Islamic countries because, because of oil they have got lots of money (a gift of nature, nothing of their own doing), and there is lack of local talent.

Indians over there have to live very carefully.

There they are always in danger of getting arrested even on slightest pretext.

They can easily get incarcerated.

They can receive lashes and spend years in jail even for getting into an argument with a native.

They can be sentenced to death merely for consuming alcohol publicly.

No matter how many years they spend in those countries, they never become, and can never become citizens of those countries.

In our part of New Delhi when the population of Bangladeshi (Muslim) immigrants increased there was a sudden spike in crimes.

People would get waylaid and robbed and even murdered.

When these immigrants were confronted, suddenly crowds of 500–1000 immigrants would gather and the situation would go out of hand.

Stones are pelted whenever there is a Hindu procession going through a Muslim area.

Most of the Hindu temples have been demolished in Kashmir which is a Muslim-majority area.

Aside from intolerance and extreme views, Muslims, when they have a significant number, also skew the political scenario of the country.

They don’t vote on the basis of which party is going to do good for the country.

They vote on the basis of which party is going to leave them to their ways and let them have their ways vis-à-vis other communities.

In fact, precisely this is the reason why divisive parties like the Congress, TMC and AAP are so much in favor of granting citizenship to the Rohingyas and the Bangladeshi infiltrators — they know that this extra chunk of the Muslim population will vote for these parties or other corrupt parties who will readily leave them to their devices.

The common tactic of these politicians is: keep the larger Hindu community divided into various vote banks, and keep the Muslims happy by looking the other way when members of their community indulge in indiscretions.

This is the reason why the politicians in Europe are so eager to accept refugees.

Most of the Muslims believe in being Muslims first and citizens of the country second.

They think in terms of being citizens only when they think that their rights are being threatened, CAA, for example.

This Pew study graph shouldn’t come as a surprise for people who have been observing Muslims for a while:

Source

76% people in the study said that right or wrong depends on the situation.

There was a Khilafat movement in India in support of the Sultana of Ottoman.

There have been several demonstrations and protests by Muslims in support of the Palestinian movement, even vandalizing local property.

Muslim protesters in Mumbai ransacked a war memorial because they were protesting against the government’s decision to send the Rohingya Muslims to wherever they came from.

They’re more concerned about how some Muslims are being treated in another part of the globe than how people of their own country (but from another religion) are being treated in their own neighborhood.

Of course, there are exceptions and I’m not trying to paint all Muslims with the same brush, but there is a pattern, a wider pattern that is concerning, especially among Muslims living in South Asia.

Even renowned Muslims, Muslims who are otherwise known to be very liberal (Bollywood types), come to stand with their more radical brethren when it comes to religion.

Another Pew study reveals that 84% respondents believe in sharia in Pakistan, 99% in Afghanistan and 82% in Bangladesh.

Source

People who are concerned about future — those people who think in terms of 200–300–500 years — can see a big problem unfolding.

Those who live in the present, either can’t see, or are too obsessed with a particular line of thinking that they don’t want to think in those terms.

The elephant in the room is the population shift from the neighboring countries over a long period of time.

If between 80–100% people from these countries believe in sharia, just imagine them entering the country as refugees and then becoming Indian citizens.

These people subscribe to extreme views.

They come from a radicalized environment.

Then they spread their radical thoughts among Indian Muslims.

The need of the hour is for Indian Muslims is to come up with a way to recognize infiltrators among their communities.

They should abandon their pan- Islamic-brotherhood mentality, and instead of worrying about Rohingyas and Bangladeshi infiltrators just because they are Muslims, they should think of the safety and security of their own fellow Indians.