India Unrest To Continue as Modi Stokes Religious Tensions
India Protests Show Modi’s Hardline Agenda May Hurt Economy
(Bloomberg) -- Escalating protests against India’s new citizenship law have raised concerns that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone too far in appealing to his Hindu nationalist base, increasing the risk of communal bloodshed and threatening to undermine his plans to attract investment.
Police stormed university campuses across India to quell week-long protests by students against a law that bars undocumented Muslims from neighbors Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan from seeking citizenship while allowing migrants from other religions. Modi’s top political opponents organized rallies against the law, with the Congress Party’s Rahul Gandhi calling the legislation “mass weapons of polarization.”
Sporadic violence has broken out, with at least 60 students injured during clashes with police on Sunday night in Delhi. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, protesters vandalized a police station and set cars on fire, prompting officers to fire in the air, Press Trust of India reported.
Neither Modi nor opposition parties are backing down, showing that his appeals to a base that wants India to abandon its secular roots could undermine his efforts to attract foreign investment. Asia’s third-biggest economy is growing at its slowest pace in more than six years and unemployment is the highest in more than four decades.
“If the protests become bigger and gain momentum, that might have a bearing on the market,” said Abhimanyu Sofat, head of research at IIFL Securities Ltd. in Mumbai. “For now it has changed the focus from economic issues the country is grappling with, like lower growth and higher inflation. More of the government’s bandwidth may be taken up with handling the protests, which is a concern.”
Still, India’s benchmark S&P BSE Sensex index jumped to a record Tuesday fueled by $13.3 billion of net overseas purchases this year. The rupee has gained 1.2% in the past month, making it Asia’s best-performing major currency after the Taiwanese dollar.
Calls for Calm
Modi issued a series of tweets on Monday defending the law and calling for peace, two days after he told an election rally protesters could be identified by the clothes they wear, a reference to headscarves and other Islamic attire. He blamed the violence on “vested interest groups” and said the legislation reflects “India’s centuries old culture of acceptance, harmony, compassion and brotherhood.”
Opposition parties announced a nationwide protest on Dec. 19 and three large states said they would not implement the new law. The defiance comes within days of Modi losing his hold over Maharashtra, India’s richest state, where opposition parties and a former ally formed a government.
Modi’s political opponents also demanded a judicial inquiry into police forcibly entering the Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi. Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the capital’s police headquarters till past midnight on Sunday, demanding the law be overturned while deriding Modi and his powerful home minister Amit Shah.
Shah showed no signs of trying to calm the dissent on Monday, pledging at an election rally in Jharkhand that work on the controversial Ram temple would soon begin after the Supreme Court handed complete ownership of the site to Hindus over Muslims on Nov. 9. Riots near the site in 1992 killed at least 1,000 people.
“The Supreme Court has given its verdict,” Shah said. “Now within four months, a temple of Lord Ram touching the sky will come up in Ayodhya.”
Religious violence between Hindus and Muslims has loomed over India’s politics since its founding in 1947. Periodic riots have flared up over the years: Ten years after the riots in Ayodhya, communal violence in Gujarat state during Modi’s tenure as leader killed about 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. Modi denied accusations that he failed to stem the riots, and a Supreme Court-appointed panel investigating one documented incident found no evidence that he made decisions that prevented victims from receiving assistance.
The new law is the third major move since May that’s affected the country’s Muslim population, and is seen as a precursor to Modi’s plans to implement a nationwide citizenship drive to weed out undocumented migrants.
Public Rebuke
In August the government scrapped the autonomous status of India’s only Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, where Modi’s local political opponents have been held in detention ever since. Some 1.9 million people in Assam -- many of them Muslims -- risk losing their Indian citizenship after the state enforced a citizens register in August. And in November, the Supreme Court handed Hindus control of the disputed site of the demolished mosque in Ayodhya.
The rising anger is the first major public rebuke for Modi, who has so far enjoyed unparalleled personal popularity since he was first elected in 2014. That has largely held even despite disruptive policies like his decision three years ago to demonetize 86% of the country’s currency, which led to a prolonged period of business instability and personal hardship.
“This is the single biggest challenge Modi has faced,” said Delhi-based political analyst and Modi’s biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay. “With this citizenship law, people think things have probably gone too far. People are genuinely worried about whether India is becoming an illiberal society.”
Modi has made efforts to pitch India’s diversity as an advantage for investors. But protests following the new law have begun to affect India’s international image, with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe postponing a plan to meet Modi in Assam. Another trip by foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen of Bangladesh, a key ally in Asia, was also called off. “We are closely following developments regarding the Citizenship Amendment Act. We urge authorities to protect and respect the right of peaceful assembly,” the U.S. State Department said overnight. “We also urge protesters to refrain from violence.”
“India may be moving into a phase of domestic turmoil so intense as to preoccupy the country and put its foreign policy on a slower or more disrupted track,” said Alyssa Ayres, a former U.S. diplomat and senior fellow for South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
--With assistance from Ronojoy Mazumdar.
To contact the reporter on this story: Archana Chaudhary in New Delhi at achaudhary2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net, Muneeza Naqvi
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