The EconomistDecember 14th 2019 Leaders 111T
he ideaseems anodyne, even laudable. India is amending its
laws to make it easier for refugees from neighbouring coun-
tries to gain citizenship. The problem is in the fine print. While
Hindus, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians from Af-
ghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan will be put on a fast track to
naturalisation, Muslims, Jews and atheists will receive no such
benefit. That defeats the point of the change, since minority
Muslim sects and secularists are among the most persecuted
groups in those countries. Worse, it is a calculated insult to In-
dia’s 200m Muslims. And most alarming of all, the change un-
dermines the secular foundations of Indian democracy.
The Lok Sabha or lower house of the Indian parliament,
where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) enjoys a large ma-
jority, approved the relevant changes to the law
on citizenship on December 9th (see Asia sec-
tion). The bill passed through the upper house
two days later, despite impassioned objections
from across the political and social spectrum.
The law has already been challenged in the Su-
preme Court. In the interest of social stability, of
India’s reputation as a liberal democracy and of
preserving the ideals of India’s constitution, the
court should speedily and unequivocally reject it.
After all, Article 14 of the constitution reads: “The State shall
not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal pro-
tection of the laws within the territory of India.” To accept reli-
gion as a basis for speedier citizenship is to cock a snook at In-
dia’s own founding fathers, who proudly contrasted their vision
of an open, pluralist society against the closed, Islamic purity of
next-door Pakistan (see Books & arts section).
The government justifies its exclusion of Muslim refugees by
saying they cannot be persecuted by states that proclaim Islam
as their official religion. This is nonsense. Just ask the Ahmadis,
a Muslim sect whose members have been viciously hounded in
Pakistan as heretics, or the Shia Hazaras who are routinely mur-
dered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Also excluded are the Mus-
lim Rohingyas fleeing mostly Buddhist Myanmar and the
100,000-odd Hindu Tamils who fled to India to escape civil war
in Sri Lanka, a self-declared Buddhist state. And even as the gov-
ernment claims a wish to salve human misfortune, in parlia-
mentary debate it brusquely rejected a proposal to extend the
bill’s embrace to all immigrants fleeing persecution.
The best explanation for the bill is politics. Thebjpis the off-
spring of a larger family of Hindu-nationalist groups, whose
long-term objective is indeed to subvert India’s secular constitu-
tion by redefining the country as an explicitly Hindu state. Politi-
cally speaking, thebjphas long profited from driving a wedge be-
tween India’s sects, with the aim of consolidating the Hindu vote
in its own camp. The citizenship bill would be
bad enough on its own, but combined with an-
other initiative being energetically pursued by
thebjp, the compilation of a National Register
of Citizens, it could be explosive.
In the state of Assam the government recent-
ly determined that 1.9m out of 33m residents are
not pukka Indians, largely because they have no
papers, as is common in poor countries. To the
chagrin of Hindu chauvinists who demanded the citizenship
checks in Assam, many of those who failed to prove Indian roots
turned out not to be Muslims, but Hindus of Bangladeshi origin.
The new citizenship rules will allow these people to be natural-
ised, leaving only the Muslims to be stripped of rights, shunted
into camps or expelled. The government has budgeted an initial
$1.7bn to extend this process nationwide.
Not surprisingly, Muslims across the rest of India now fear
that they, too, will be singled out and obliged to dig up genera-
tions of tattered family documents to prove their Indianness. Al-
ready, there are calls for civil disobedience to resist such humili-
ation. It is easy to see how violence might follow. Seldom has
apparent magnanimity disguised such malevolence. 7Undermining India’s secular constitution
A bill purporting to help refugees is really aimed at hurting MuslimsHindu chauvinismT
he armstrade is lucrative and controversial. Over $80bn-
worth of weapons are exported by Western countries each
year. The business is governed by a mesh of rules designed to
prevent—or at least limit—proliferation and misuse. This sys-
tem is imperfect, but does have some bite. In Britain court cases
have contested the legality of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia be-
cause they may have been used against civilians in Yemen. Ger-
many froze exports to the kingdom in 2018.
These days, though, physical weapons such as missiles, guns
and tanks are only part of the story. A growing, multi-billion-dol-
lar industry exports “intrusion software” designed to snoop on
smartphones, desktop computers and servers (see Business sec-
tion). There is compelling evidence that such software is being
used by oppressive regimes to spy on and harass their critics. The
same tools could also proliferate and be turned back against the
West. Governments need to ensure that this new kind of arms ex-
port does not slip through the net.
Dozens of firms are involved in the cyber-snooping business;
the largest has been valued at $1bn. Many are based in Western
countries or their allies, and employ former spooks who learned
their craft in intelligence agencies. There is a legitimate business
selling cyber-intelligence tools to foreign customers—for exam-The digital dogs of war
Cyber-mercenaries should be stopped from selling virtual weapons to autocratsThe spying business