Authors: JYOTI SHANMUGAM, KRISH BAAHUBALI, AND VINAY BHARATH
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose.
Saint Paul, Minnesota is home to about 50,000 thriving Indian-Americans, many of whom have lived here peacefully for decades. Many Hindu Americans take pride in calling the beautiful tolerant state of Minnesota their home, with pure joy. The Hindu Temple of Minnesota in Maple Grove has many patrons in the community and is a thriving, flourishing center for nurturing Hinduism, the religion that is followed by 81% of India’s population and by the majority of Indian-Americans in the United States. These Indian-Americans were awakened by a rude shock on May 20, 2020: the Saint Paul City Council approved Resolution 20-712, declaring the government of India “Islamophobic.”
The initiative to do this was led by Saint Paul City Council member Jane Prince, very secretively working since March 2020 with Sadia Tarannum of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN). This resolution condemns the new Indian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
Some background is required to understand this conflict. The Muslims had invaded India in the 11th century A.D., and had successfully plundered and destroyed Hindu kingdoms and Hindu temples. The Muslim invaders of India were responsible for the massacre of 100 million Hindus, the largest genocide in human history. From the plundered wealth of India, many Middle Eastern countries were glorified. With the arrival of the British as the East India Company, and the subsequent British rule, the barbaric Muslim rule dissipated; however, the descendants of the Muslims who had ruled India remained the country, converting many local Hindus by sheer force and sometimes even with torture.
Near the end of protests against the British rule, the Muslims of India demanded separate countries to accommodate the Muslim population of Indian subcontinent. Hence the land of the current Pakistan, including Pakistan, Baluchistan, and Sindh, were taken by Muslims led by the All-India Muslim League and separatist call of Muhamed Ali Jinnah. Likewise, East Pakistan, another Muslim-majority land, was created as a separate country; that is the current Bangladesh. There was a 23% non-Muslim population in Pakistan in 1947; today that percentage has dropped shockingly to a paltry 2%. Purposeful attacks targeting this minority population are carried out regularly right under the nose and with the knowledge of the military-backed Pakistan government. Attacks have included bomb blasts targeting Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. The most recent incident was the attack on a gurdwara attack in the Afghan capital, Kabul, also of course a Muslim-majority country, as a retaliation for one of the 600 remaining members of the Sikh religion deciding to stand in a city election later this year. Afghanistan’s territory also belonged to the greater Indian subcontinent in the past, and hence many non-Muslim minorities still remain there, having so far survived many such attacks.
Other acts of violence against non-Muslim minorities, including Hindus, Jains, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists in the countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan include the burning down of Hindu homes, the excavation and vandalism of the graveyards of Christians, the burning alive of Hindu children while they sleep, the raping of Hindu women and the kidnapping of young Hindu girls and their forcible conversion to Islam, after which they are “married” for two to three months, and sometimes even later sold as ISIS sex slaves.
Despite these barbaric atrocities against non-Muslim minorities in these countries that are geographically close to India, and knowing well that the non-Muslims suffered so much and for so long, some members of these minorities believed the words of the cunning Muslim leaders who chose to break away from India in 1947 to establish on the Muslim population as a majority in what are today Pakistan and Bangladesh. Little did these naïve and trusting non-Muslims realize the dangerous future they had chosen for themselves and their subsequent generations in 1947.
Experiencing relentless and unspeakable atrocities, the non-Muslim minorities of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh have been entering India over the years as refugees, seeking refuge in India, their homeland. India is the land that welcomes refugees, providing safe harbor to the likes of the Dalai Lama, who was escaping the fury of the Communist Chinese, and the Sri Lankan Tamil population, which was fleeing bloodcurdling terrorism by Sri Lankan organizations.
Pakistan’s borders with India are watched closely; however, the India-Bangladesh border is not. Hence many Hindu families facing the same wrath from the Muslim majority in Bangladesh flee into India; they are happy to live as refugees in India even if they’re homeless, until the government of India provides methods for their entry into the mainstream society of India.
Given this constant influx of religiously persecuted refugees into India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, mainly consisting of non-Muslim minorities from these countries, India passed a law, the Citizenship Amendment Act in 1950, laying out the terms of how one could get citizenship in India. Based on increasing religious persecution in 2019, it amended this bill to reduce the duration of the stay in India required to gain Indian citizenship after fleeing religious persecution, from eleven years to five years. This was the CAA of 2019. Refugees who entered India prior to 2014 could also be considered eligible for citizenship. This is similar to a US permanent resident becoming eligible for US citizenship after five years of residence in the United States after becoming a permanent resident.
The goal of the 2019 CAA was clearly to reduce the burden for non-Muslim minority refugees, Hindus, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs already fleeing religious persecution at the hands of the Muslim majorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and to help them get established safely as Indian citizens.
However, with the passing of the CAA in 2019, the Muslims in India began organizing themselves into protest groups and rights groups, squatting in key public areas in India’s capital of New Delhi, setting fire to many areas in Delhi, throwing stones at Indian police and asking them to return home, and also attacking Hindu girls and Hindu men in government service, and urging Muslims all over India to protest against the CAA.
Why? Because they twisted the intention of the CAA, claiming it discriminated against the Muslims. They tried every method to convince the population of India, the neighboring countries, and the entire world that the CAA was intended only to target and discriminate against the Muslims. They thereby effectively obscured the real purpose of the CAA, which is to rescue persecuted religious minorities in the three neighboring countries of India. Their argument is that the bill does not include Muslims while it lists every other religion. How could it, when it aims to protect only the non-Muslims from the Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan? That would be similar to inviting Hitler and the Nazis from a place where the Nazi population outnumbers the Jewish population and performs atrocities against the Jews to a place offering refuge to the Jews. Full Story @ Jihad Watch