OP-ED: BJP’s Citizenship Bill Mirrors Nuremberg Laws

When Nazi Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, they made it illegal for non-Germans to be citizens.

Germans to prove that they had Aryan ancestry.

India’s Citizenship Amendment Bill mirrors those Nazi laws. Instead of segregating people by genetics, it segregates them by religion. It makes religion the basis for citizenship.

CAB is only the latest in a line of recent fascist actions in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “New India.”

It has been a grim year for India as Modi’s BJP rams through its Hindu nationalist agenda with blitzkrieg speed.

After Modi was re-elected in May, he wasted no time in implementing the BJP’s long-standing demands.

That includes:

1 — Enacting the National Register of Citizens in Assam, ultimately stripping nearly 2 million Assamese of citizenship. Modi’s government is currently building concentration camps to house these people who have been newly-made stateless.

2 — Scrapping Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir. Modi’s government stripped the only Muslim-majority state in India of its semi-autonomous status — then stole away its statehood. Kashmir remains under martial law.

3 — Giving the green light to build a temple on disputed land in Ayodhya — and handing over the rights to do so to the same people responsible for the violent demolition of the mosque that once stood on that site.

A grim week concludes this grim year now that Modi’s regime has passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill.

The BJP’s next goal is to implement the National Register of Citizens across the whole country. This puts all residents of India in the position of having to prove their citizenship.

CAB and NRC combined provide a legal route for the BJP to begin cleansing the land of Muslims — and, ultimately, of all non-Hindus.

That’s the goal of the BJP — and the Nazi-inspired RSS paramilitary that controls it.

Calling the RSS “Nazi-inspired” is not a euphemism.

Not only was the RSS founded the same year that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, but its guru — a man called MS Golwalkar — wanted to copy Nazi racial policies.

When the Nazis staged pogroms against the Jews, Golwalkar called it the highest form of “race pride.” He praised Nazi Germany for “purging the country” of Jews. He called the Nazi racial policies — the Nuremberg Laws — “a good lesson for us to learn and profit by.”

The guru of the RSS said that any Indian who is not a Hindu is a “traitor” and called it “treason” to be a non-Hindu in India. Today, Modi calls that RSS leader his “guru worthy of worship.”

Today, the current head of the RSS says that India is a Hindu nation.

One of the final nails in the coffin of Indian secularism will be a national anti-conversion law — a law requiring people to receive government permission to change their religion, thus criminalizing freedom of religion.

In these grim times, hope is the one thing we must never give up no matter how hopeless the situation seems.

Stay filled with hope — even blind, stupid, irrational hope.

Because we know the truth.

We know Hitler always loses.

As they say in Hindi: “Jo Hitler ka raj karega, vo Hitler ki maut marega.”

Those who rule like Hitler will meet Hitler’s end.

• Pieter Friedrich is a South Asian Affairs Analyst who resides in California. He is the co-author of Captivating the Simple-Hearted: A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent.

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