By Jeff Shantz March 1, 2020
On Sunday, March 1, 2020, around 50 people gathered in Holland Park in Surrey to speak against the Indian government’s recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), legislation that is identified as being racist and Islamophobic, to remember those who have died protesting the Act, and to stand in solidarity with Muslim people targeted by the Act and all those in India fighting it. Dozens of people have been killed in India during demonstrations against the Act and numerous opponents have been arrested since the law was passed in 2019.
The CAA is a discriminatory law that closes pathways to citizenship for Muslim migrants from largely Muslim countries neighbouring India. Refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are eligible for citizenship in India if they are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, or Christian but it specifically rules Muslims as being ineligible.
Opponents have mobilized against the racist authoritarianism of the CAA as a violation of human rights, and also because it violates the Indian constitution and its principles of secularism and non-discrimination on the basis of religion.
Speakers in Surrey identified the legislation as part of the fascist politics of Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government in India. Several speakers connected the fascism growing in India under the BJP with growing fascist movements globally, including in Canada. They spoke to the need to organize solidarity against fascism wherever it appears and in whatever form it takes.
Significantly, some of those who spoke related the racist and exclusionary politics of the BJP, and the stoking of racist attacks against Muslims in India, with state violence against Indigenous people in Canada, particularly in the context of police repression of Wet’suwet’en land defenders and Indigenous allies, especially. The racist policies in India and Canada were situated as ongoing elements of colonization and colonial policies of divide and conquer, in the context in which both the Indian and Canadian states are outcomes of British imperialism and colonization.
The rally was organized by Indians Abroad for Pluralist India. Numerous groups had people present at the rally, including the East India Defence Committee, Independent Jewish Voices (Canada), Fraser Valley Peace Council, the New Westminster and District Labour Council, Anti-Police Power Surrey, and the BC Teachers Federation.
