Indians lower house of parliament
has approved a bill that would grant residency and citizenship rights to
non-Muslim immigrants, sparking protests that brought the country's populous
northeast to a near standstill.
The legislation, which still needs
approval of the upper house, seeks to grant rights to Hindus, Jains, Parsi and
several other non-Muslim religious groups who migrated illegally from Bangladesh,
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"They have no place to go
except India," Home Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament on Tuesday.
"The beneficiaries of the bill can reside in any state of the
country."
Critics have called the proposal,
contained in a Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019, blatantly anti-Muslim and an attempt
by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to boost its Hindu voter base
ahead of a general election due by May.
The bill sparked a second day of
protests in the northeastern state of Assam,
where nearly 4 million people, accused of being foreigners, were effectively stripped of
their citizenship last year.
Protesters there are angry not because the bill excludes Muslims, but because it would grant citizenship to undocumented Hindus, who failed to prove their citizenship and hence were excluded from the draft list of National Register of Citizens (NRC) published last July.
The final NRC list is due to be published on June 30.
The bill is unlikely to pass the upper house of parliament, which is not controlled by the ruling party. However, if it is not passed, the government could pass a decree that would not require legislators' approval.
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