At Congressional briefing on Assam, rights defenders urge US to designate India as CPC

WASHINGTON, D.C. :  Leading  Indian American human rights defenders  on Wednesday  condemned the Indian government drive to forcibly remove hundreds of thousands of Muslims from their homes in the north east Indian state of Assam on September 20  resulting in the death of  three people including a 13 year old boy in the Assam police firing.  Speaking at the Congressional Briefing, they demanded that the United States should designate India a Country of Particular Concern for this targeted anti-Muslim discrimination and called the eviction drive a brazen attempt at turning millions of Indian Muslims into non-citizens. The briefing was cosponsored by a group of 17 human rights and interfaith organizations, including the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Amnesty International USA and Hindus for Human Rights.

In the wake of this targeted anti-Muslim and Christian discrimination in Assam and other parts of the country, the speakers of the briefing demanded that the United States designate India a Country of Particular Concern, or CPC.

According to the US Department of State’s Office of International Religious Freedom, a CPC is a nation that is “engaged in or [tolerates] particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” including “flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons.” India has been recommended by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to be placed on the CPC list for two years in a row.

Aman Wadud, Fulbright Scholar at UT Law and defense lawyer for multiple NRC victims, spoke on the fear of mass statelessness that is growing among Muslims in the region.

“This reverification is not because of any demand for excluding illegal migrants that have crept in. It is a political demand,” said Wadud, who in 2020 testified before the USCIRF on India’s alarming rates of anti-Muslim discrimination. If this process of asking India’s own citizens to prove their citizenship [begins] again, [all] people will live in fear. [All] people’s dignity will be stripped.”

Siddhartha Deb, journalist and author, pointed out the discriminatory nature of the eviction drives. “With or without the NRC, or with endless NRCs going on, Bengali Muslims in Assam are targets,” he said. “The US government needs to make it very clear to Modi that this kind of targeting of Muslims in Assam, around the country, is not acceptable. I think there is a very good reason to declare India a Country of Particular Concern.”

“In recent years, the BJP’s aggressive CAA-NRC politics has exacerbated the divisions stemming out of the common belief that ‘indigenous’ Assamese are losing their land to ‘illegal Bangladeshi migrants’ and has overlaid a unique Hindutva agenda on top of them,” said Nadim Khan, cofounder of the United Against Hate campaign and secretary of the Association for Protection of Civil Rights in India. “The BJP has been exploiting the ethnic and religious fault lines in Assam for electoral gains, and running a hate campaign against Muslims, who account for one-third of the state’s population.”

Even Hindus who find themselves left off the registry face difficulties. Under the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, Bengali-speaking Hindus do have the option to reapply for citizenship. However, even if they have been living in Assam for generations, the rules of the CAA force them to claim that they are Bengali refugees and not Indians by birth.

Deb who has written on the Assam evictions for the New York Times, emphasized that the discrimination does not stem from a vacuum. “In India, when we say Muslims are under attack, we also need to be saying that democracy is under attack, freedom is under attack. It all goes together.”