In Modi’s India, are There Echoes of Nuremberg?

The Constitution of India was written amid the sombre shadows of frenzied religious violence of the Partition. In this, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs slaughtered more than a million of each other on both sides of the new border, and 15 million people were uprooted from their homelands.

Pakistan, carved out of the western and eastern flanks of undivided India, was created as a country of and for Muslims. By contrast, the people of India resolved overwhelmingly— through their 389 representatives in the Constituent Assembly in deliberations spread over more than three years— that free India would not be a religious State.

Although the word “secular” was added to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution only three decades later, the resolve at the time of the writing of the Constitution was unequivocal.

Although the word “secular” was added to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution only three decades later, the resolve at the time of the writing of the Constitution was unequivocal. India would be a secular democratic republic.

India’s constitutional secularism meant many things. The State would have no religion. It would scrupulously be equidistant from all religions. People of every persuasion, both of majority and minority faiths, would have full freedom not just to practice but also to propagate their religious beliefs.

The State would have the right but also the duty to intervene in religious practice when this contravened constitutional morality. People of all minority faiths would be assured full citizenship rights equal to those of people of the majority religion.

It would be the duty of the State both to defend these rights and to ensure that the State does not discriminate in any way on the basis of religion.

The practice of Indian secularism during the building of the Indian Republic was never perfect. From the start, but particularly after the passing of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, successive governments in New Delhi as well as various state capitals have on many occasions compromised with constitutional principles of secular democracy in diverse ways.

But the edifice of secularism still survived these assaults. Until now. The decade of the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has seen a blitz of onslaughts of such gravity and force that many fear that India has already transformed in practice into a religious State, a Hindu rashtra, even though the letter of the Preamble of the Constitution still retains the pledges of secular (and socialist) democracy.

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There were many egregious incursions that stormed the citadel of secular democracy in the decade of Modi’s leadership. These violated both religious freedom and equal citizenship rights of religious minorities, most prominently of Muslim citizens, but also, on occasion, of Christians.

It would be the duty of the State both to defend these rights and to ensure that the State does not discriminate in any way on the basis of religion.

This piece will focus on two assaults by statute on Indian secularism. One of these assails the principle of equal citizenship of Muslims. The other criminalises religious conversion for inter-religious marriages. We will ask if these two sets of laws contain echoes of the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany.

Nuremberg held special significance during the Nazi era partly because of its location in the centre of Germany. The Nuremberg laws were announced by Adolf Hitler in September 1935 after a massive triumphal rally in Nuremberg, in the only meeting of the Reichstag held outside Berlin in the years of Nazi rule in Germany.

The Nuremberg laws both stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship rights and criminalised inter-religious marital and sexual unions. The Reich Citizenship Law made only Germans eligible to be Reich citizens.

The rest— mainly Jews, but also the Sinti and Roma and Black people— were classified as State subjects bereft of any citizenship rights. Even before this, Hitler had declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, and debarred by law so-called non-Aryans from the civil service and professions such as legal practice and teaching.

The second Nuremberg statute was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which outlawed marriage and sex between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans. Violators were sentenced to incarceration in prisons and concentration camps, resulting often in death.

These two Nuremberg laws reduced Germany’s Jews to non-citizens and criminalised marriages and sex between Jews and Germans. Do laws passed in Modi’s India carry echoes of the Nuremberg laws?

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India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in the winter of 2019, ignited the largest peaceful mass uprising that free India has seen, in which not just Muslim citizens but hundreds of thousands of those of every faith and identity joined hands to protest the law in most corners of the country.

Indians were able to gauge immediately the dangers of a law that for the first time used the filter of religious identity to determine a person’s right to citizenship. They saw in this the thin edge of a wedge that could overturn India’s secular democracy.

The rationale offered for this amendment by leaders of the government was that this is a humanitarian refugee law designed to aid and shelter persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries. But even a cursory study of the law and the more recently notified Rules reveals first that the word persecution finds no mention anywhere. An applicant for citizenship is not required to either claim or prove persecution.

There were many egregious incursions that stormed the citadel of secular democracy in the decade of Modi’s leadership.

There is also no explanation why India’s 2019 citizenship law only provides fast-track applications for citizenship to undocumented persons from three Muslim-majority countries— Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Religious persecution is a grim reality in almost every country in India’s neighbourhood— of Hindus, Christians and Ahmediyas in Pakistan; Hindus, Sikhs and Hazara Shias in Afghanistan; the Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans in China; Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; Tamil Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka; and Hindus in Bangladesh.

If humanitarian considerations drove the law, then why should India not have opened its doors to the most savagely persecuted minorities in India’s neighbourhood who are among the most persecuted peoples in the world— Rohingya from Myanmar, Ahmediyas from Pakistan and Uyghurs from China? Is it because all of these people are of Muslim identity except the Hindu Tamils from Sri Lanka?

Possibly the ideology that actually spurs the law is the conviction that just as Israel is the natural home of every Jewish person, India is the natural home of Hindus from anywhere in the world. But this presumed tacit ideological underpinning pushes India away from the secular idea of the country embedded in its Constitution, from the idea that India belongs equally to its Hindu, Muslim, Adivasi, Dalit, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and atheist populations.

The dread that the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act is taking Indian Muslims down the same path as the Nuremberg laws took German Jews— effectively disenfranchising Indian Muslims— was inflamed partly by periodic public declarations by the prime minister and Union home minister stigmatising Muslims as “infiltrators”. (This continues even in the Prime Minister’s speeches in the 2024 general elections).

The word “infiltrator” is loaded in ways that “illegal immigrant” is not; it suggests a malign conspiracy to occupy a land that is not theirs by right.

Trepidation mounted further with the declaration by the Union home minister that people should note the “chronology” of the policy decisions of the government; that their government first brought in the Citizenship Amendment Act and then would bring in a National Register of Citizenship (NRC).

The NRC implemented in the state of Assam caused immense suffering to millions of residents of this state bordering Bangladesh, most of all because it reversed the burden of proof and presumption of innocence.

The Nuremberg laws both stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship rights and criminalised inter-religious marital and sexual unions.

All residents had to prove with vintage hard-to-procure documents that they were citizens, and if they failed to do this, the State would presume that they were illegal immigrants (or ‘infiltrators’, if you prefer), would declare them non-citizens and possibly incarcerate them in detention centres.

But if one were an undocumented Hindu, one would have nothing to worry about because with the Citizenship Amendment Act now in the statute books, one would be presumed to be a persecuted Hindu from Bangladesh and one’s citizenship would be fast-tracked.

Contrarily, the protection of this presumption would be denied if one were a Muslim.

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Equally fearsome for Indian Muslims have been the spate of what informally are called ‘love jihad’ laws that have mushroomed in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states during the decade of Modi’s leadership of the country.

Once again, these do not explicitly bar and criminalise relationships of Muslim men with Hindu women in the way the Nuremberg laws did. But in the manner that these laws are being interpreted and implemented by the police and even on occasion courts, this is what in practice these laws accomplish.

A survey by the Pew Research Centre conducted in 2019–20 found optimistically that 84 percent of those surveyed said that to be “truly Indian”, it is very important to respect all religions. About 80 percent Indians said that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.

Yet, paradoxically, roughly two-thirds of Hindus say it is very important to stop Hindu women (67 percent) or Hindu men (65 percent) from marrying into other religious communities. The ratios were even higher for Muslims in their opposition to interreligious marriage: 80 percent and 76 percent respectively.

India has long been a dangerous place for couples who choose to marry or live together with persons of other faiths or ‘lower’ castes. Families themselves are known to murder women and men who transgress these societal barriers, in a phenomenon misnamed as ‘honour killings’.

The perils of such couples have grown manifold with the spread of the toxic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) myth of ‘love jihad’, the falsehood that Muslim men are trained to romantically and sexually trap Hindu women into marriage aiming to convert them to Islam and produce masses of Muslim children as part of a demographic conspiracy. But the so-called love jihad laws have increased the dangers to interfaith couples incrementally.

What is love jihad? Journalists Betwa Sharma and Ahmer Khan string together some fake narratives constructed around this toxic Hindutva myth. These include claims that Muslim men masquerade as Hindu using Hindu names and religious symbols; that Muslim women befriend Hindu women to introduce them to their ‘jihadi’ brothers; that Muslim shopkeepers, especially those who run mobile phone shops, keep an eye on Hindu women in the area; that local mosques give young men money to pursue Hindu women and reward them for successfully marrying and converting them— the higher the caste, the more money received; that Muslims seek employment as drivers and cooks in Hindu households, often working for lower wages than their Hindu counterparts, so they can lure women in the family.

The Reich Citizenship Law made only Germans eligible to be Reich citizens.

This is why “Hindus should not employ Muslims in their homes”. Then they create a vast network of informers “in schools, colleges, buses, coffee shops, gyms, hotels, cinema halls, courts, and coaching centres for after-school tutoring”, who can report on inter-religious romantic relationships. Many times, “Hindus will inform on women in their own families. Even marriage officials in some Hindu communities will inform a woman’s parents”.

Studies indicate that around 90 percent of marriages in India are monogamous, heterosexual, arranged and within the same religious community and caste. Less than 2 percent of marriages are inter-faith, and the overwhelming majority of these are between consensual adults.

Yet, the Hindu right, even from pre-Partition days, has fostered the emotive fabrication of the Muslim man as a sexual predator. The latest incarnation of this myth is the propaganda of pervasive love jihad.

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During the ten years of Modi’s leadership, senior BJP leaders including chief ministers and Union ministers helped propagate and legitimise this hateful untruth.

“I warn those who conceal identity and play with our sisters’ respect,” declared Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, “if you don’t mend your ways, your ‘Ram naam satya’ journey will begin.”

Hindus chant ‘Ram naam satya hai’ meaning “Ram’s name is Truth” when they carry corpses to the cremation ground. In effect, the chief minister was threatening them with murder.

He was not alone. The Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, for instance, declared in 2023 that “things like love jihad” will not be tolerated in the state.

He instructed senior police officers to take “stern action” against love jihad, and also to conduct verification drives from time to time to look into the antecedents of people coming from outside and settling in the state.

He claimed the growing numbers of people coming out against love jihad reflected a growing awareness about crimes of this nature partly because of what are colloquially called love jihad laws.

But in doublespeak that is characteristic of the BJP leadership when it is obvious that it is transgressing limits set by the constitution, the Union government (in a written reply in the Parliament by the Union minister of state for home, G. Kishan Reddy, in February 2020, was categorical that the term ‘love jihad’ is not defined under the law, and no such case has been reported by any of the Union agencies.

He rightly affirmed that Article 25 of the Constitution provides for the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion subject to public order, morality and health. “Various courts, including the Kerala High Court, have upheld this view,” he said in a written reply.

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What are popularly termed love ‘jihad’ laws are actually amendments to laws related to religious conversions that variously place barriers on changes in religion due to marriage.

The amendments to anti-conversion laws in seven BJP-ruled states during the Modi years require interfaith couples to apply to state officials and make public announcements of their desire to marry.

There is also no explanation why India’s 2019 citizenship law only provides fast-track applications for citizenship to undocumented persons from three Muslim-majority countries— Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

These effectively criminalise such marriages with the perils of jail and the marriage being declared void, and expose them even more to the dangers of vigilante intimidation and violence. These multiple dangers rise further when the couple chooses to live together outside marriage.

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To understand the import of recent love jihad statutes, we need to trace briefly the evolution of anti-conversion laws, what these regulated and criminalised.

Tracking the history of anti-conversion laws from the 1960s to the contemporary enactments to “prevent love jihad” legislation, senior human rights defender Mihir Desai aptly describes these as representing “a transformation from a hesitant Hindu right-wing nationalism to a highly bellicose— no holds barred— avatar evidenced at present.”

Article 25(1) of the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution is unambiguous in its expansive interpretation of religious freedom to incorporate “the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion (emphasis mine).”

Odisha was the first state government to enact an anti-conversion law in 1967. Like later such laws in other states, again in characteristic doublespeak, this was called the Freedom of Religion Act.

Madhya Pradesh was the next in 1968. Other states followed, including Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu (where it was later repealed), Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.

The word “infiltrator” is loaded in ways that “illegal immigrant” is not; it suggests a malign conspiracy to occupy a land that is not theirs by right.

These laws criminalised religious conversion through force, fraud, inducement or allurement. This is unexceptionable in principle. The problem is how in these, and later similar laws, the words are defined and interpreted.

In many statutes, force includes even the threat of divine displeasure; fraud includes misrepresentation and inducement; and allurement includes any gift or gratification in cash or kind, or even services such as health care and education.

These wide definitions in effect severely narrow down the fundamental right of religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.

These laws require public declarations before a district magistrate, usually in advance of the conversion and, in some cases, there are also public notices.

Many laws provide for punishment, including imprisonment of those who convert; but some laws even penalise the person who converts, and annul the conversion.

During the ten years of Modi’s leadership, a number of BJP-ruled state governments not only made their anti-conversion laws more stringent, even more gravely, they weaponised these to effectively discourage and criminalise marriages and even live-in relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women.

The Freedom of Religion Act passed by the Jharkhand state assembly in 2017 provided for imprisonment and a fine even for the person who converts. It made, for the first time, offences under the act non-bailable. The Rules required the district magistrate to maintain registers of religious institutions, empowers her to inspect the institutions and the records of those who benefited from these institutions.

It was Uttarakhand in 2018 that first brought conversion for marriage into its statutory prohibitions. Its statute laid down that “no person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any other person from one religion to another by use of misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage (emphasis mine).”

The language of the act seemed to criminalise religious conversion by choice of an adult in an inter-religious marriage. This was somewhat tempered by the Rules which qualify “marriage done as a consequence of conversion from one religion to another religion” as criminalised if this is “done with the intention of misrepresentation, force, coercion, allurement or any other fraudulent means”.

Equally fearsome for Indian Muslims have been the spate of what informally are called ‘love jihad’ laws that have mushroomed in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states during the decade of Modi’s leadership of the country.

The laws shifted the burden of proof to the person who is converted to establish that the conversion was lawful. It also laid down for the first time a minimum punishment, of one year’s imprisonment raised to two years if the person who is converted is a member of a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe.

It expanded the definition of prohibited allurement to include “free education in a reputed school run by any religious body, easy money, better lifestyle, divine pleasure or otherwise”. On the other hand, it effectively exempted conversions to Hinduism, with the clause that “if any person comes back to his ancestral religion, (this) shall not be deemed conversion under this Act”.

The Uttar Pradesh Ordinance of 2020 (which was passed by the state assembly in March 2021) was more categorical in criminalising religious conversions by anyone “by marriage”, irrespective of whether the conversion was voluntary or not.

Besides, even trying to convince someone to convert was declared a crime. Such marriages could be declared void by the court. The law also included the Uttarakhand provisions of shifting the burden of proof, making the offences non-bailable, prescribing minimum punishments, and exempting conversions to a person’s “immediate prior religion”.

Other BJP-ruled states— Jharkhand (2017), Himachal Pradesh (2019), Madhya Pradesh (2021), Gujarat (2021), Karnataka (2022) and Haryana (2022)— similarly amended their anti-conversion laws during the Modi decade.

All the states except Jharkhand made unlawful religious conversion for marriage, with the aim to effectively criminalise interfaith marriages by Muslim men.

Punishments are more stringent, minimum punishments are prescribed, and the offences are non-bailable. Earlier laws required only subsequent intimation of conversion to the authorities, now the laws require prior permission, a public display of details and police enquiry.

In the social reality of interfaith unions in India, this enables both families and vigilantes to violently prevent the marriages or punish the couples.

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The social impacts of the passage and implementation of these laws have been to make inter-religious unions markedly more perilous. Not just have anti-conversion laws become more stringent and excluded marriage as a lawful ground for religious conversion. Not just families and local communities, as in the past; now Hindutva vigilantes and state authorities frequently work in close concert with families opposed to these marriages to forcefully prevent such unions, criminalise the men and coerce the women into marriages with men within their community.

These laws have been interpreted and weaponised both by police authorities and vigilantes. Newslaundry investigated the consequences of the passage of the Haryana Prevention of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act in 2022.

Its reporters spoke with police officers who pointed to a massive rise in motivated complaints of forced conversions by families of interfaith couples and vigilantes after the passage of the new law.

All the states except Jharkhand made unlawful religious conversion for marriage, with the aim to effectively criminalise interfaith marriages by Muslim men.

Journalists Betwa Sharma and Ahmer Khan similarly scrutinised the working on the ground of the Uttar Pradesh Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020.

Both investigations exposed a terrifying ground picture of the partnership of ideologically driven and misogynist Hindutva vigilantes, families of Hindu girls opposed to their choice of marrying Muslim men, and the police and state administration.

Sharma and Khan observe that although Uttar Pradesh does not explicitly ban marriage between Hindu women and Muslim men, “Hindu vigilantes in the state have wielded it to lead unencumbered ‘love jihad’ investigations in collaboration with the police, often using violence and manipulation… The vigilantes pursue alleged cases of ‘love jihad’ despite the national government’s insistence that such a crime does not legally exist.”

The vigilantes and the police typically work in close partnership. Once the vigilantes learn of an interfaith relationship, they call the police and seek their help for cell phone surveillance of these couples, and their intimidation and interrogation.

In one fraught case investigated by Newslaundry, a 22-year-old working woman Sanskriti Shukla converted to Islam before she married one Javed Khan in 2023. She tried to convince her father that she loved her husband who she freely chose to marry.

But her father filed a complaint of forced conversion against Javed under the new anti-conversion law, two months after the marriage. Threats from Hindutva vigilantes such as the Bajrang Dal and the Bittu Bajrangi-led Gau Raksha Bajrang Force forced the couple to flee into hiding.

In another tragic instance, a Hindu woman Twinkle married Muslim Shahrukh despite the opposition of her family, but three years ago her body was found hanging from a fan at their home.

Shahrukh was arrested not for abetment of suicide but for conversion. Twinkle’s family credits Hindutva vigilantes, especially Bittu Bajrangi, for getting the case filed “under new laws”.  “If Bittu would not have been with us, we might not have even got the FIR filed,” her brother Sumit said to reporters.

The vigilantes admit to intimidating women with what they call “counselling”. This entails even physical violence against the woman, threats to throw acid on her face and cut off her nose; and to have the police “encounter” her Muslim lover, a euphemism for his extra-judicial murder.

The parents are advised to emotionally blackmail their daughter with fainting, feigning heart attacks and threats of poisoning themselves. Once the girl succumbs, they vigorously take responsibility to arrange her marriage with one of their many volunteers, for which they circulate her photograph and bio-details on their WhatsApp groups.

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All of this violates the directions of the Supreme Court, which in numerous judgments has upheld the right of choice of consenting adults to marry or live together. In Lata Singh versus State of UP, where an inter-caste couple sought protection from harassment from the police and their relatives, the Supreme Court affirmed that “once a person becomes a major he or she can marry whosoever he/she likes”.

In S. Khushboo versus Kanniammal, the Supreme Court held that “live-in relationship between two consenting adults of heterogenic sex does not amount to any offence”.

The Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, for instance, declared in 2023 that “things like love jihad” will not be tolerated in the state.

In Shafin Jahan versus Ashokan K.M (the Hadiya marriage case) the Supreme Court recognised a girl’s right to choose as part of her personal liberty and individual authority by declaring that, “The choice of a partner whether within or outside marriage lies within the exclusive domain of each individual.”

However, in practice, as we have seen, often the police and sometimes lower courts too fail or directly refuse to uphold these rights when the couple are from different faiths or castes.

Sarasu Esther Thomas, professor at India’s premier law school, the National Law University, Bangalore, observes that the consequence of the slew of recent anti-conversion statutes is that interfaith couples fear not just social sanctions but increasingly the State.

Earlier, as long as the couple was not of the same sex or statutorily underage, the sanctity of marriage was widely accepted and statutory security was extended to the couple in danger of violence or forced separation.

Today, after these new laws, a family court in many states can declare an inter-religious marriage void, even if the adult couple chooses to live with each other.

If “marriages are no longer safe,” Thomas asks, “what of the unmarried, in live-in relationships?”

The anti-conversion laws so far have not sought to regulate live-in relationships. But an ominous development for the private right of adults to choose their partners is the Uniform Civil Code introduced in 2024 by the BJP-ruled Uttarakhand government.

This code makes it mandatory for live-in couples to register with state authorities, failing which they can be jailed. In a recent case, Kiran Rawat versus State of UP, the Allahabad High Court denied police protection to an interfaith couple in a live-in relationship.

It controversially observed, “The Supreme Court is simply accepting a social reality and it has no intention to unravel the fabric of Indian family life.”

In a recent case, Kiran Rawat versus State of UP, the Allahabad High Court denied police protection to an interfaith couple in a live-in relationship.

What complicates further the love jihad discourse and the actions of both the police and vigilantes is that not all inter-faith marriages are taboo for Hindutva ideologues and vigilantes.

Muslim men must be prevented, if necessary by vigilante violence or the power of the State, from marrying Hindu women. But if a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, this is on the contrary a matter for celebration.

These diametrically opposed yardsticks derive from the misogynist prism of patriarchy, in which a woman is treated as the property of the community (and not as an individual with her full agency).

So, if a Muslim man marries a Hindu woman, he is stealing Hindu “property” and therefore merits punishment, even violence and death. On the other hand, when a Hindu man weds a Muslim, he is swelling Hindu “property” and this deserves welcome. On occasion, Hindutva vigilante groups go uninvited to such weddings where they bawdily dance and blare loud music.

The law does not make such an explicit distinction, except by excluding— as in Uttar Pradesh— conversions to one’s immediately preceding religion.

Since most Indian Muslims are presumed to have converted at some time in their ancestry from the Hindu faith, in effect this clause in the law exempts conversions from Islam to Hinduism.

However, a rapid review of the implementation of love jihad laws reveals in practice its selective application only to Muslim men marrying (or in live-in relationships) outside their faith, and not to Hindu men who love and marry outside their faith.

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In Modi’s India of 2024, are there echoes of the Nuremberg of 1935? In Nazi Germany, the official resolve to expel Jews, the Roma and Sinti people and Black Germans from citizenship was explicit and strident. So too was the official determination to make sex and marriage between Jews and Germans a grave crime.

In Modi’s India, the aspirations and sometimes even the public discourse are not dissimilar. But the exclusion and criminalisation of the country’s Muslim citizens through laws and State action are more covert, as we have seen, with Indian statutes of citizenship and inter-faith marriages not as explicit in their exclusions of Indian Muslims as the Nuremberg laws were of German Jews.

However, in their formulation, and also in the official discourse and practice that accompanied these, the threats to both equal citizenship rights of Muslims and their consensual interfaith relations are grave and violative of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

As we saw, the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 does not directly strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship. What it did do for the first time was to introduce religious identity as salient to a person’s eligibility to be a citizen of India; and to exclude undocumented Muslims from a presumption available to Indians of other faiths that they are persecuted minorities from Muslim-majority countries from India’s neighbourhood.

Today, after these new laws, a family court in many states can declare an inter-religious marriage void, even if the adult couple chooses to live with each other.

Similarly, earlier laws did not deal with religious conversions for marriage. But now by including conversions for marriage among the prohibited motivations for religious conversion, the new statutes effectively restrain, discourage and even prohibit both conversions for marriage and inter-religious marriages.

During the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, many Muslim women from around the country lamented to me that they were haunted by the fear that they would be made “be-vatan”, literally people without a nation.

The cumulative impact of the changes in anti-conversion laws during the ten years of Modi’s leadership has been the drastic curtailment of both religious freedoms and the freedom of adults to choose their partners— for companionship, for sex, for romance and for marriage— outside their faith.

With the violation both by the State and civic vigilantism of these essential freedoms, the pledges of India’s Constitution stand violated and secular democracy eclipsed.

There can be little doubt that the dark clouds of 1935 Nuremberg have gathered ominously today over the Indian skies.

I am grateful for research support from Swati Draik and Omair Khan.

Harsh Mander is a justice and peace worker, writer, columnist, researcher and teacher.