San Francisco Joins Other Cities to Condemn India's Unconstitutional Citizenship Laws

Hindus for Human Rights would like to extend our warm appreciation to all those who worked hard on the ground in the SF Bay Area, especially our partner Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), to raise the voices of the city against the dangerous path that Indian Democracy is on.

Given that the immigrant friendly City of San Francisco is home and workplace of thousands of Indian Americans, we hope that this resolution will be a wake-up call to the community to also raise our voices against the policies of the Modi/Shah government, which is presiding over and/or condoning unprecedented levels of violence and intimidation against the minorities and activists.

We reproduce below the letter we sent to all the Supervisors in support of the resolution that was passed yesterday by unanimous voice vote. 

THE TEXT OF OUR LETTER TO SF BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

July 20, 2020

Dear Honorable Members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors;

We are writing to urge you to support Supervisor Mar’s resolution opposing India’s discriminatory and unconstitutional National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), affirming San Francisco as a welcoming city that support the rights of all minorities. 

Hindus for Human Rights is a US-based advocacy organization dedicated to speaking up for the human rights of all communities in India, the U.S., and beyond. We have presence in several cities in the U.S., including the SF Bay Area, and we also have ground presence in India.

One of the areas of our work in India has been to keep close track of the NRC project from its very inception, to the point where its implementation in the state of Assam left 1.9 million people stateless – simply because they could not meet the onerous documents required to prove their presence in India. 

The NRC process turned out to be so arbitrary that sometimes within the same family, one sibling was admitted and the other rejected; at other time, parents were in, but the children were not, etc. The process has been particularly harsh on women headed households, as one can imagine.

The worst part of the Assam outcome was that, contrary to what the BJP government had expected, more than half of those rejected were Hindus! 

That was the genesis of the Modi government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was quickly enacted under the guise of offering asylum to persecuted minorities from neighboring countries. But the real intent of the CAA was to devise a way to allow only Hindus and others of the 1.9 million excluded to remain in India, while all Muslims were to remain in limbo and potentially sent to detention camps -- which could be the death warrant for many of them, especially the aged and the infirm.

It is the CAA and the so called National Population Register (NPR), the first stage of the NRC, which are now being planned for all of India. 

Knowing the outcomes in Assam, this plan is seen as an existential threat by over 190 million Muslim citizens of India, who fear that they may be next to be made stateless in their own country of birth, by a government that has made no secret of wanting to establish a Hindu majoritarian state.

Today, under the cover of COVID-19 lock-downs, the Indian government is going about systematically hounding and arresting many of those who participated in peaceful protests against the CAA, using laws that now allow any individual to be declared a terrorist or even “causing disaffection against the government.” The space for dissent and press freedoms are shrinking fast.

We provide here a link to the just released fact-finding report by the Delhi Minorities Commission detailing how the state and the police machinery have been filing charges against the victims, while the real offenders are continuing their provocations with immunity: Report of state complicity in Delhi

This is the context in which we feel that American lawmakers, all the way from the Congress to City Councils must raise their voices against the dangerous path that a fellow democratic country and America’s friend is on under the leadership of the BJP’s Modi government.

Please join Supervisors Gordon Mar, Matt Haney, Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston and Ahsha Safai and support their statement of solidarity against human rights abuses in India. We urge you to vote YES this Tuesday.

Best Regards,

Raju Rajagopal

Co-founder, www.hindusforhumanrights.org