A Western Sydney University expert in South Asian citizenship, migration and mobility is available to provide media comment on the implications of India’s new citizenship laws and resulting protests.
Dr Malini Sur, an anthropologist from the University’s Institute for Culture and Society, has conducted extensive research in the conflict ridden zones of the India-Bangladesh border.
Dr Sur says India’s new citizenship changes will enforce the enduring persistence of statelessness.
“The amendment will deepen the political and economic crisis that ordinary Indians are facing,” she says.
“It will reinforce Hindu nationalist discourses on the cultural otherness of Indian Muslims (over 211 million), as well as their supposed connection with terrorism and criminality.”
“In carefully crafted legal wording, India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government has offered Indian citizenship to designated ‘persecuted minorities’ – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians – who have ‘illegally’ migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan on or before December 31, 2014. Unsurprisingly, the law does not include persecuted Muslims from these neighbouring states, nor does it have any provisions to include non-Muslim refugees from Sri Lanka.”
