Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently decided to cancel his planned visit to India. The national emergency caused by the bushfires rightly prompted the cancellation. But the underlying commitment to build closer relationships with India remains firm.
The reason seems carbon-clear: coal exports and courting Indian companies to invest in Australian coal mines. But the rhetoric is both economic and political. Morrison has cited India as a 'regional success story', a 'land of durable institutions and shared values', making India 'a natural partner for Australia'.
It may be true that India has historically shared many political values with Australia: democracy, a secular constitution, and a commitment to a plural society. But Australians should be aware that the current government of India is committed to dismantling precisely those values.
And while many Australians are assembling, tweeting and signing petitions in solidarity with the unprecedented protests in India in defence of basic human rights, and to uphold the constitution, the Coalition government has so far preferred to take an unprincipled approach. Going beyond diplomatic civility, Morrison has taken selfies with Modi, tweeting one picture with 'How good is Modi' written under it in Hindi after last year's G20 Summit.
Some sections of the Australian media have represented the current protests and strikes simply as 'riots'. But the situation is more serious than non-specific unrest in a far-off land. The catalyst for the protests has been the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by the Indian Parliament on 9 December 2019, and the associated National Citizenship Register (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) processes.
The CAA fast tracks citizenship for migrants from various named minorities from the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but specifically excludes Muslims (including persecuted Muslim minority groups, such as the Ahmadiyas). The act and register come hand in hand with widespread misinformation campaigns and hate speech against the Rohingya Muslims, fleeing extreme violence in Myanmar.
The NPR-NRC process would upscale the ongoing process in Assam, which has disenfranchised 1.9 million people who could not provide documentary evidence of their right to Indian citizenship. Widely condemned by civil society, the process is being accompanied by the construction of detention centres to hold those effectively stripped of citizenship, until now understood as presumptive in a country where many people, especially the poor, have no access to official documents.
"These are the practices of political leaders who seek power through cracking the demos and pitting the jagged