Nine people have reportedly been killed so far in the ongoing protests across India, as many continue to demonstrate against this controversial bill.
Nine people have reportedly been killed so far in the ongoing protests across India, as many continue to demonstrate against this controversial bill.
Speaking at the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019, which has gathered the leaders of some of the most populous Muslim-majority nations, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has criticized India’s controversial citizenship bill – questioning the “necessity” of the bill when “people are dying”.
India’s citizenship bill, being dubbed the ‘anti-Muslim’ bill online, will specifically only grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who have either fled to or moved to India. All Muslims who fall under this same category will not be granted citizenship.
Modi’s leading BJP government in India has increasingly come under fire for its Hindu-nationalist and seemingly anti-Muslim rhetoric – especially with the controversial citizen’s register in Assam that left 1.9 million mainly Muslim Indians stateless and the continued crackdown in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir. This new citizenship bill has since caused massive protests across India.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the Kuala Lumpur Summit, the Malaysian Prime Minister stated:
People are dying because of this law. Why is there a necessity to do this when all the while, for 70 years, they have lived together as citizens without any problem?”
Explaining that a bill like the current one the Indian government is administrating would only cause “chaos and instability”, Prime Minister Mahathir also stated:
I am sorry to see that India, which claims to be a secular state, now is taking action to deprive some Muslims of their citizenship.”
Nine people have reportedly been killed so far in the ongoing protests across India, as many continue to demonstrate against this controversial bill. The United Nations have called the bill “fundamentally discriminatory”, however as of yet Modi’s increasingly open Hindu-nationalist government has not backed down from its crackdown on the protesters.
