India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which passed in December 2019, violates the letter and spirit of the country’s constitution. It blatantly discriminates against Muslims, thereby undermining the constitutional guarantees of equality to all Indians. This article examines the intention of subordinating Indian Muslims that underpins the constitutional amendment. Such subordination is consistent with the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government’s larger project of building a Hindu Rashtra—that is, an ethnically defined nation where Hindu supremacy is enshrined.

Proponents of the amendment defend the CAA’s exclusion of Muslims by citing the “reasonable classifications” provided for in the Indian constitution. These reasonable classifications allow the government to institute protective discrimination in favor of members of Scheduled Castes (i.e., communities oppressed as “untouchable”—also known as Dalits) and Scheduled Tribes (i.e., communities stigmatized as “primitive”—also known as Adivasis). The amendment’s supporters claim that the legislation fast-tracks citizenship claims of religious minorities—including Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Zoroastrians—persecuted in India’s three Muslim-majority neighboring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

However, constitutional experts disagree. The eminent scholar Faizan Mustafa (Reference Mustafa2019) argued that the classification cannot be considered reasonable because it does not cover all of India’s neighbors. The amendment singles out Muslim-majority countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for coverage and also excludes Hindu and Muslim minorities persecuted in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka and Myanmar, respectively. Furthermore, the amendment does not cover all persecuted minorities. It excludes from its ambit the Ahmediya community in Pakistan, the persecution of which is well documented. The Shia minority in all three Muslim-majority countries faces routine discrimination, which the amendment refuses to recognize.

The CAA provisions violate the egalitarian provisions of the Indian constitution. Article 14 states that any person residing within its territory has the right to equality before the law. Therefore, according to Article 14, migrants of the Islamic faith who entered the country before December 31, 2014, should be entitled to citizenship within the same provisions envisaged for members of other communities. Supporters of the amendment point to Articles 29 and 30 of the constitution to argue that the document, in fact, does discriminate in favor of religious minorities in India. They argue that both Articles have provisions to empower minority groups—linguistic, ethnic, and religious—to preserve their identity. However, the two Articles are designed to prevent discrimination against religious minorities in India. Article 29 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, or language in admission to educational institutions. Article 30 calls for minority groups based on religion and language to set up educational institutions of their choice. Both Articles address discrimination on the basis of religion, which the CAA violates.

India’s Home Minister Amit Shah defended the exclusion of Muslims from the amended citizenship laws by making disingenuous claims. He suggests that Muslims in Islamic republics, by definition, cannot be subjected to religious persecution. The status of these countries as Islamic republics confers preferential treatment to all Muslims, Shah claims. However, he ignores the vast scholarship that suggests that declarations of institutional piety are used to persecute not only non-Muslim minorities but also Muslims allegedly deviating from officially sanctioned Islam. For example, women in Pakistan were subjected to draconian Hudood Ordinances that brought that country’s penal code in line with Sharia laws. They could be sentenced to imprisonment, flogging, or death if accused of “crimes” such as adultery. The ordinances made it extremely difficult for women to prove an allegation of rape because they were required to provide evidence of their own good moral character. Indeed, as it happened, the number of women held in Pakistani prisons increased manifoldly within a decade of introduction of the ordinances: from 70 in 1979 to almost 6,000 in 1988. The persecution of Muslim women in Pakistan was arguably religious because their subordination was legitimized in the name of religion. By ignoring this evidence, India’s Home Minister betrays the government’s commitment toward eliminating discrimination against Muslims.

The explanation offered by the Home Minister is a shameless attempt to legitimize discrimination against Muslims and their subordination to the cause of establishing a Hindu Rashtra in India (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot Reference Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot2019; Rehman Reference Rehman2018; Roy Reference Royforthcoming). His explanation is consistent with recent decisions adopted and implemented by the Indian government. For example, in August 2019, the government abrogated Article 370 of the constitution, which accorded special status to the country’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir. Not only did it strip the state of its autonomous status; it also divided it into two Union Territories, to be administered directly by Delhi. In November 2019, the Supreme Court awarded a tract of land in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya—disputed between Hindus and Muslims—entirely to the Hindus. A sixteenth-century mosque was demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992 to restore the temple to Rama, over which the mosque allegedly had been built in 1528. The Court awarded the land to the Hindus so they could build the temple. No less than the Prime Minister himself consecrated the temple. The Modi regime thus has built a rather robust reputation as one with a declared objective to subordinate Muslims. Benefiting from the success of both Supreme Court decisions, the CAA consolidates the concerted attempt by the BJP-led government to establish a subordinated citizenship for Muslims in India.

These attempts have a well-established genealogy in India. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who famously coined the term Hindutva to define Hindu-ness in 1923, envisaged a second-class status for Muslims (Noorani Reference Noorani2002). Distinguishing between Fatherland and Holy Land, he was prepared to concede that India may well be the Fatherland for India’s minorities, given the fact of their birth in the country. However, it could never be their Holy Land because their places of worship were outside of the territory of India. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), spiritual mentor to the BJP government, was even clearer: K. B. Hedgewar, who founded the RSS on September 27, 1925, famously compared Muslims to snakes. M. S. Gowalkar, another prominent ideological guru of the RSS who led the organization from 1940 until his death in 1973, made his aversion to Muslims clear in the following observations:

“If we (Hindus) worship in the temple, he (the Muslim) would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals (rath yatras), that would irritate him. If we worship the cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her.”Footnote ¹

To be sure, proponents of a Hindu Rashtra have refrained from calling for the liquidation or annihilation of Muslims; the sheer number of Muslims makes this impractical.Footnote ² Rather, Hindutva ideologues and activists prefer a political community in which Muslims are disenfranchised and subordinated to the majority-Hindu community. The CAA’s blatantly discriminatory attitude toward Muslims moves India closer to their goal.