Barely one-and-a-half months after the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the BJP has given the Indian electorate yet another divisive issue that it feels could further consolidate Hindu votes in its favour.

The Centre on March 11 notified the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2024, that would facilitate the implementation of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. The very next day, on March 12, the online portal to submit applications for Indian citizenship under the CAA went live.

What is CAA 2019?
The 2019 Amendment essentially exempted from the definition of illegal migrant members of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian communities who came to India from three neighbouring Muslim countries - Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan - on or before December 31, 2014.

In other words, any non-Muslim who had entered India from these Muslim countries before December 31, 2014, even without a valid passport and other travel documents will be registered or naturalised as a citizen of India from the date of his entry into India. From the moment the Act was passed in 2019, all proceedings launched against a non-Muslim individual related to illegal entry were also quashed.

The path to citizenship was also made smoother for the non-Muslims. To be registered as an Indian citizen, a person has to reside in India for at least seven years. To be naturalised, an applicant has to reside in India for at least 11 years. But for non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the CAA watered down the residency clause. For them, it will be five years.

Till the CAA was passed, citizenship could be acquired by four means: by birth, by descent, by registration and by naturalisation. Now a fifth window has been opened: Religion.

Is the CAA discriminatory?
For the first time, religion has been introduced as a criterion for judging an individual’s merit to acquire citizenship. Now, if a person is an illegal migrant in India, it has to be a Muslim from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan. The stigma has been lifted from the members of other communities.

Home Minister Amit Shah said the amendment was to offer protection to minorities persecuted on religious grounds. What about the persecuted Buddhists in Tibet? The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar? Tamils in Sri Lanka? Hindus in Malaysia? And what about the ethnic Hazaras, Ahmaddiyas and atheists who are persecuted in Pakistan in the name of religion? Why aren't their citizenships being fast-tracked like that of the non-Muslims from the three neighbouring Muslim countries?

This is a country which Swami Vivekananda had once raved about to his Chicago audience. "I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth," the monk told the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893.

Should Muslims fear CAA?
On the face of it, what Amit Shah said is true. The CAA cannot take away the citizenship of any Muslim in the country. The CAA's mandate is to provide quick citizenship, if only to non-Muslims, and not to strip anyone, even a Muslim, of it.

However, it can be problematic if the Centre decides to draw up the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC), more commonly known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC was introduced in the 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act of 1955 to "compulsorily register every citizen of India and issue a national identity card to him".

As it stands, the NRC has been implemented only in Assam. But Amit Shah has vowed to extend its implementation to the rest of the country.

If this happens and a Muslim individual's citizenship is found "doubtful", he or she could be subjected to the official scrutiny of the Registrar General of Citizen Registration and then kept out of the NRC. Result: The person would be rendered stateless. Such stateless beings could either be deported or lodged in specially designed jails.

If members of the Hindu, Sikh, Parsi or Christian community find themselves in such a situation, they can at least claim, even using forged documents, that they had arrived from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan. The CAA has forever shut such a possibility of redemption for Muslims.

Is NRC something to be feared?
If the NRC experiment in Assam is anything to go by, there are reasons for the ordinary citizen to be wary. When the NRC for Assam was published on August 31, 2019, 19 lakh or 5.76 per cent of Assam's population of 3.3 crore found themselves out of the register. Nearly 70 per cent of the 'outcasts' were women.

This could very easily mean that they did not have the necessary documents and not that they were illegal migrants. Many, especially the poor and illiterate, will not be able to provide correct answers for certain NRC questions like 'date of birth' and 'place of birth'.

But this is just a smaller worry. The bigger one is that the rules allow an individual's citizenship to be regarded as "doubtful" and kept aside for scrutiny merely on the basis of an objection raised by any random person. The objector only has to back his claim with some documents.

What is the BJP's Assam paradox?
The excluded in the Assam NRC had more Hindus than Muslims. The CAA is, therefore, seen as a rescue mission launched by the BJP to retain the citizenship of the affected Hindus in Assam.

For the Assamese who are very particular about their identity, it is not the small number of Muslim immigrants who worry them but the Bengali-speaking Hindus who have migrated from Bangladesh since the 1971 Pakistan crackdown on what was then East Pakistan.

This is why indigenous organisations led by the All Assam Students' Union have risen up in arms against the latest move.