NEW DELHI/ BENGALURU/ NEW YORK: Three people died of injuries sustained in intensifying protests against a new citizenship law in India on Thursday with thousands taking to the streets nationwide in defiance of temporary bans on public gatherings. Some protesters clashed with police over the law, passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, that critics say is discriminatory against Muslims and undermines India’s secular constitution. Police detained hundreds of people in the capital Delhi and the southern city of Bengaluru and shut down the internet in some districts to help pre-empt large planned protests.
College students, academics, minority Muslim groups and opposition parties have been prominent in an escalating series of street protests now in their second week.
The government says the Citizenship Amendment Act is required to help non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who came to India before 2015 by granting them Indian nationality.
Two of Thursday’s deaths occurred in the southern city of Mangaluru and one in Lucknow in northern India, according to hospital officials. Two of the dead protesters - one in Mangaluru and one in Lucknow — had been shot, they said.
A curfew was imposed later in parts of Mangaluru. Internet and text messaging services were suspended by government order for four hours in parts of Delhi and Karnataka, mobile carriers said, widening a communications clampdown in restive areas stretching from disputed held Kashmir to the northeast.
In the financial capitalMumbai, more than 5,000 protesters gathered on Thursday evening, forcing the police to impose traffic restrictions. Haroon Patel, an Indian citizen who lives in London, joined the Mumbai rally and called the new law the first step toward dictatorship, adding: “We have to save the country.”
Supporters of the bill held a counter-demonstration in Gujarat, Modi’s home state in western India. “The fault lines are defined - either one supports the law or stands against (it). Indians have to decide and protest,” said Rupak Doshi, who organised a large rally in support of the law in Gujarat’s main city Ahmedabad.
Most protests across the country came off peacefully, but some turned violent, including in Mangaluru where stone-pelting mobs ignoring a temporary ban on public gatherings were repelled by police, a government official said.
A witness said police fired shots in the air in at least three areas and unleashed tear gas to scatter protesters. In Lucknow, three protesters were hospitalised with gunshot wounds and one later died, an official at King George Medical University said. Angry mobs in Lucknow set fire to dozens of motorcycles and cars, four media broadcast vans and three buses, police said. “People are allowed to protest, but no one is allowed to break the law,” said Yogi Adityanath, a senior leader of Modi’s party and Uttar Pradesh state chief minister.
In the eastern state of Bihar, a senior police official said more than 200 protesters detained in a police campus in Patna were chanting slogans against the law, but they would not be silenced by force.
Dozens of airline flights out of Delhi were canceled due to a lack of staff who were held up by traffic disruptions caused by protesters, and a number of Delhi metro stations closed. A senior home ministry official said maintaining law and order was a state responsibility but reserve forces were ready to provide immediate assistance.
Rights group Amnesty International has asked federal and state governments to stop the crackdown on peaceful protests against what it called a “discriminatory” citizenship law.
Defying the bans, protesters held rallies at Delhi’s historic Red Fort and a town hall in Bengaluru, but police rounded up people in the vanguard of those demonstrations as they tried to get underway.
In Bengaluru, Ramchandra Guha, a respected historian and intellectual, was taken away by police along with several other professors, according to an aide. “I am protesting non-violently, but look, they are stopping us,” said Guha.
Police said they had detained around 200 people in the city, where protest organizers said thousands attended four demonstrations on Thursday.
Opponents of the law say the exclusion of Muslims betrays a deep-seated bias against the community, which makes up 14% of India’s population, and that the law is the latest move by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to marginalize them.
Discontent with Modi’s government has burst into the open after a series of moves seen as advancing a Hindu-first agenda in a country that has long celebrated its diversity and secular constitution.
Meanwhile, security forces and protesters clashed in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka states as elsewhere police bundled demonstrators onto buses, shutting Delhi metro stations and cutting cellphone access in some areas.
Seven months after Modi swept to a second term, the past week has seen six people killed, dozens injured and on Thursday, authorities banned gatherings across swathes of the world´s biggest democracy that together are home to hundreds of millions of people. They included all of Uttar Pradesh and Bangalore, areas of the northeast and parts of Bihar, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai. All of them have seen protests in recent days, and in the case of the capital, riots and police storming a university.
As others ignored the assembly bans in Delhi and elsewhere, authorities ordered telecom firms to cut calls, text messages and data in parts of the city.
India is already the world leader in cutting the internet, activists say, and access was also restricted in parts of the northeast and in Uttar Pradesh, home to a large Muslim minority.
In the northeast, where the protests began last week -- albeit for different reasons -- around 20,000 people took to the streets in different locations. No violence was reported, however, after last week´s deadly clashes.
But the day´s biggest demonstration so far took place in Malegaon in Maharashtra state -- no assembly ban was in place -- with as many as 60,000 people, police said.
In Mumbai, a crowd of thousands including tattooed students and older Muslim men wearing skullcaps brandished Indian flags, posters of Mahatma Gandhi and handed out copies of the constitution. "We cannot stay silent or on the fringes anymore. We have to act now," financial advisor Aman Verma said.
"Something has changed. This is the first time in a long time that people in Mumbai have come out in such large numbers to register dissent," said consultant Karishma V. The crowd in Kolkata was estimated at more than 40,000.
"If they show us the lathi (police baton), we will show them roses," a student in Delhi, Shivanji, said as she handed flowers to police on Thursday.
A leading American newspaper Thursday denounced as "patently discriminatory" India's new citizenship law, and urged all democratic nations to speak out against it.
"The law, as India’s 200 million Muslims have correctly surmised, has nothing to do with helping migrants and everything to do with the campaign by Mr Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah, to marginalise Muslims and turn India into a homeland for Hindus, who comprise about 80 percent of the population of 1.3 billion," the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, referring to the eruption of protests across India after the law was passed by Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) last week.
The editorial, "Modi makes his bigotry even clearer", said: "The devil is in the missing details.
"The not-so-hidden message is that the Muslim-majority countries abutting India persecute Hindus and other minorities, and that Muslims from such countries cannot be refugees, even people like the Rohingya, some of whom have reached India after fleeing to Bangladesh from brutal repression in Myanmar.
‘Last summer, Mr Modi’s government abruptly stripped statehood and autonomy from India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, arresting many of its leaders and shutting down the internet.
Also in August, Mr Modi aggressively escalated a programme of citizenship tests in the northeastern state of Assam, leaving nearly two million people, many of them Muslims, potentially stateless.
"In common with other governments around the world that have turned undocumented immigrants into a nationalist issue, including President Trump’s, Mr Shah has taken to demonising the primary target of the dragnets, Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, whom he refers to as 'termites. "Those initial moves met little resistance. The citizenship bill, by contrast, has provoked furious protests across India, some of which have been viciously repressed by police and the army. The government has also shut down the internet in several regions, a tactic against dissent used by India more than any other authoritarian-leaning government in the world, claiming it is necessary to prevent violence and false rumors.
