Executive Summary India’s new citizenship regime under the stewardship of its freshly re-elected rightwing government has been deliberately exclusionary and non-secular. The insidiously calibrated amendments to legislations pertaining to citizenship have taken a nefarious turn in recent years. Any veneer of equality and non-discrimination has been shed. The Supreme Court of India has played its part by providing judicial approval to government actions, at every step and, is facing a credibility crisis. Throughout 2019, the Government of India directed all states to prepare a National Population Register (NPR) through door-to-door enumeration as a first step towards the creation of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC). This process, already undertaken in the state of Assam under direct oversight from the Supreme Court, resulted in 1.9 million Indians being excluded from the register. The exercise was marred by arbitrariness, abuse of authority, and prejudice against the Bengali and Muslim communities in Assam. Through this, and a parallel revision of voter lists, large number of people have been potentially or already made stateless, with limited scope for review through Foreigners Tribunals. The death toll and other human costs arising from this citizenship process, also continues to rise. As the final prong of this troika, the Central Government adopted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 providing a preferential route to naturalization for six religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh residing in India since 2014. Widely believed to assuage non-Muslims by providing a route to reinstating their citizenship, the message was clear - Muslims are unwelcome, second-class citizens of India. These legislations and their attendant processes are not only prima facie discriminatory, they are profoundly persecutory and xenophobic in their implementation and impact. They exacerbate deep-seated societal biases and feed the hypernationalistic narrative of a resurgent Hindu India by invoking a skewed history, acts of violence, and dehumanization of the largest religious minority in the country. Through a systematic and concerted effort by the Government of the day, Muslims face the threat of being deprived of their citizenship – the gateway right to all other rights necessary for a life of dignity.

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