
Citizenship Amendment Act Protests - usui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Amendment_Act_protests
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wtmt
A little more detail in a TL;DR way (summarized, but still long):

1\. There are border states in India where many people don’t want illegal
immigrants to get citizenship or any other benefits. This Act, by giving
citizenship to illegal immigrants, doesn’t respect those people’s needs and so
there have been protests from this angle by many people (mostly in those
states).

2\. This Act also arbitrarily discriminates on the basis of religion and
location, and in the guise of helping minorities, it allows non-Muslims in
certain countries who entered India before end of 2014 to get fast tracked for
citizenship. Muslim minorities in those countries (like Ahmadiyas) as well as
linguistic and ethnic minitories in neighboring countries are ignored. There
have been protests from this angle by many people.

3\. The “chronology”, as repeated by the home minister, is that a National
Register of Citizens (NRC) would be prepared across the entire country and
those without evidence of citizenship would be thrown in detention centers.
Consider that there are hundreds of millions of people in India who don’t have
a birth certificate (not issued or issued as one original and lost) and the
fact that even an Indian passport is not a true proof of citizenship (there’s
precedence with legal doubts cast on this). No government issued document is a
proof of citizenship since all of those could be obtained by dubious means by
anyone. This is ripe for bureaucratic abuse and corruption. Mix in the fact
that the rules of the CAA could be changed by the executive to include certain
non-Muslims even when the NRC declares them as not citizens, you have a huge
self created problem where hundreds of millions could be declared stateless
while many others are running from pillar to post with bribes in hand to be
recognized as citizens.

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usui
Thanks for the insight, very interesting. Do you think that verifiable
citizenship could ever be a solved problem at such a scale? Is the cat out of
the bag, so-to-speak? I've never known that it could be so difficult to pin
down genuine citizenship.

~~~
wtmt
I personally don’t believe it’s ever possible to solve verifiable citizenship
even in larger developed countries, leave alone in a diverse and populous
country like India. Corruption at the long and porous borders and local levels
is one big issue. There are many other factors with the populace, education
levels, digital literacy, etc.

