NEW DELHI: In his 1623 play titled ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, legendary playwright William Shakespeare wrote, “There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her.” So during the past week, we witnessed a ‘merry war’ of words between Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Delhi BJP president Virendra Sacheva on the issue of the notification of Citizenship Amendment Act 2019.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019. It amended the Citizenship Act, 1955 by providing an accelerated pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who arrived in India by 2014. The eligible minorities were stated as Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians.
The notification, ahead of the general elections, has invited some discussions as the act for the first time in Indian legal history overtly uses religion a criterion for citizenship. Expectedly it has sparked protests especially in those parts of the country that border Bangladesh and large tranche of Muslim population had migrated from the neighbouring nation.
The fear, from an electoral point of view, was that a large number of the members from the minority community could be disenfranchised and affect the fortunes of the parties both who enjoyed the support of the minority community and those who did not. Delhi per se doesn’t have presence in substantial numbers of migrant Muslims on the electoral rolls, nor would the number of non-Muslim migrants swell the electoral rolls substantially. Then why is the chief minister crying hoarse.
In a post on the micro-blogging site X, Kejriwal wrote, “The audacity of these Pakistanis! First, they illegally infiltrated our country, breaking our laws. They should have been in jail. They have the audacity to protest in our country, causing unrest? After the implementation of CAA, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis will spread all over the country and harass people. BJP is causing trouble to the entire country for its own selfish interest of making them their vote bank.”
The whole attempt is to create a sentiment of insecurity not just among the 20 percent-odd Muslim voters in the national Capital but also on seats in Gujarat from where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has put up its candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. In Gujarat, the award of citizenship to Hindu migrants from the neighbouring areas of Sindh in Pakistan is a major issue.
Coming back to the national Capital, the head of the Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Virendra Sachdeva, has retorted, “Kejriwal is himself a ‘Andolanjeevi’ who owes his political career to demonstrations and it is shameful that today he is abusing persecuted Hindus from Pakistan and Afghanistan demonstrating for their rights. By abusing these migrants, the Chief Minister has humiliated all those Punjabis who came over from Pakistan to India during the 1947 partition.” In saying this Sachdeva has his own axe to grind.
Delhi’s politics, especially that of the BJP, for long has meandered around the Bania and Punjabi leaders. Till late chief minister Saheb Singh Verma emerged on the horizon, BJP in the national Capital was firmly controlled by the Punjabi triumvirate of Madanlal Khurana, Kidar Nath Sahni and Vijay Kumar Malhotra. Though a fourth quotient too has emerged in the form of Purvanchal leaders, the leadership has more or less remained between the Bania and Punjabi communities.
Sachdeva himself is from the Punjabi community and has the onerous responsibility of getting his protégé Harsh Malhotra, also a Punjabi, win from the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat. In the allocation of seats in the national Capital, East Delhi since 2019 has become the Punjabi quota seat.
Thus the fracas between Kejriwal and Sachdeva, has more to do with the polls than with the fate of the non-Muslim migrants awaiting citizenship - Much Ado About Nothing.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice
