The City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts has unanimously passed a resolution, asking India to repeal the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act that excludes Muslims from becoming a citizen under a new plan.
Cambridge, the seat of learning with its Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins Seattle, the center of technology, in rebuking India’s hard-line BJP Government’s move that bans any regional Muslims from seeking Indian citizenship.
The Cambridge city resolution asks the Indian Parliament to “uphold” the country’s secular constitution by repealing the law and stopping a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), which requires Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship.
The move has been widely condemned as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalistic agenda, and being “racist and repressive” in its intent.
Earlier, Seattle, Washington, adopted a similar resolution.
“It has come to the attention of the city council that on December 11, 2019, the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which for the first time uses religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship,” the Cambridge City Council’s resolution says.
The Cambridge resolution says “Modi government’s racist and repressive policies” run counter to the the values of the city, “which welcomes South Asian communities of all castes and religions.”
According to an Al Jazeera report, Rachel Wyon, an activist in Cambridge who was born in India to British parents, says that laws such as CAA echoed the Nazi Germany of the 1930s.
“Through the CAA, most of us can recognise the echo of the 1930s in Germany when a Nazi government took similar steps – closely parallel to the NRC and CAA – which we know now were initial steps towards the Holocaust,” said Wyon.
Modi’s government has taken some radical steps that challenge the country’s longstanding secular traditions. A series of hearings on the Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. lambasted the ruling BJP’s exclusionary ideology, particularly its revocation of autonomous status of UN-recognized disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
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