The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was quoted in the statement as saying, “Although India’s broader naturalization laws remain in place, these amendments will have a discriminatory effect on people’s access to nationality”.

The legislation appears to undermine India’s commitment to equality before the law, something that is protected by the Constitution.

While commenting on protecting persecuted groups, the OHCHR said that while it welcomes protecting such groups, it should be done through a “robust” asylum system that is based on equality and non-discrimination, “which applies to all people regardless of race, religion, national origin or other status.”

Exceptions to the present Act: The provisions on citizenship for illegal migrants will not apply to two categories – states protected by the ‘Inner Line’, and areas covered under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.

Inner Line Permit (ILP): This is a special permit that citizens from other parts of India require to enter a state protected by the ILP regime.

Without an ILP granted by the state government, an Indian from another state cannot visit a state that is under the ILP regime.

Sixth Schedule: The Sixth Schedule relates to special provisions in administration of certain North-eastern states (Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura).

It provides special powers for Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) in these states.

Points that supported the Act:

• After Independence, not once but twice, India conceded that the minorities in its neighbourhood is its responsibility.
• First, immediately after Partition and again during the Indira-Mujib Pact in 1972 when India had agreed to absorb over 1.2 million refugees.
• It is a historical fact that on both occasions, it was only the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians who had come over to Indian side.
• This Bill will come as a big boon to all those people who have been the victims of Partition and the subsequent conversion of the three countries into theocratic Islamic republics.
• Citing partition between India and Pakistan on religious lines in 1947, the government has argued that millions of citizens of undivided India belonging to various faiths were staying in Pakistan and Bangladesh from 1947.
• The constitutions of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh provide for a specific state religion.
• As a result, many persons belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities have faced persecution on grounds of religion in those countries.
• Many such persons have fled to India to seek shelter and continued to stay in India even if their travel documents have expired or they have incomplete or no documents.

Language and survival:

• A closer look at the UNESCO classification of endangered languages will illuminate further the Northeast’s reaction to the CAA.
• If a language is vulnerable because of the small size of the number of speakers, it becomes more so if the language is spoken only in certain domains for instance at home, but not at schools and offices, etc.
• It becomes definitely endangered if parents speak the language and children only know the language but do not speak it as mother tongue.
• It becomes critically endangered if the grandparents’ generation speak the language, parents know it but do not use it, and children do not know it any more.
• The protest against the amended Citizenship Act has another dimension in Assam and other parts of the Northeast.
• The protesters in Assam have opposed the entire Citizenship Amendment Bill. They have called amendment to the Citizenship Act as unwarranted and the one that threatens their social, economic and cultural identity.
• Extinct languages are those languages which no longer have any speakers. In the UNESCO list, several languages in the Northeast have already become extinct; many more are critically endangered.
• As Ganesh N. Devy, cultural activist and the man behind the People’s Linguistic Survey of India campaign, has said, when a language dies, a world view dies with it.
• Under the circumstances, the response of the Northeast to the CAA, is not merely tribal xenophobia as many have portrayed it to be with patronising condescension, but a desperate survival throe.

Conclusion:

The current migration issue is also a consequence of this bitter politics of antagonism of the past.

Nobody is perfectly innocent or guilty in this sordid drama, and the way forward has to be on the path of truth and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela showed.

At a time, when violence is rocking swathes of the country and India’s global stock as a liberal democracy is plummeting precisely on account of initiatives like the abrogation of Article 370 and the passage of the CAA.

It would appear that conciliation would be the best way forward to contain violence and reassure those in need of reassurance, pending a determination by the Supreme Court on the constitutional validity of the Act.