In her interview to the Swiss television RTS, Shalini Randeria, Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and professor of Anthropology and Sociology, discusses the public protest in many Indian cities against the new the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

The law facilitates the process of granting Indian nationality to non-Muslim minorities from neighbouring Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. By thus relating citizenship to membership of certain religious communities, it departs from the secular principles and the right to non-discrimination on religious grounds enshrined in the Indian Constitution. This is the reason that many protesters, predominantly women, are using the Indian Constitution as a key symbol in their sit-in and demonstrations, explains Shalini Randeria.  

She situates the protests in the context of religious polarization and growing dissatisfaction over the economic downturn in the country, which has shown a remarkable economic growth rates over the past decades. With the strengthening of ethnic nationalism and exclusionary majoritarianism the world over, the question of who belongs to the nation becomes central to the demographic imaginaries of democractic societies.
 

Photo Credit: IWM / Zsolt Marton