44 Asia The EconomistDecember 14th 2019
21hul baba says don’t expel them [Muslim
migrants],” he sneered. “What are they,
your chachere bhai, your cousins? I assure
you that before the national election in
2024 I will throw them all out.”
Like the changes to the citizenship law,
this promise has formed part of the bjp’s
election manifesto since Mr Shah’s boss,
Narendra Modi, became India’s prime min-
ister in 2014. Before illegal immigrants are
expelled, however, they must first be iden-
tified. One Indian state, Assam, has over
the past four years undertaken just such an
exercise. Responding to decades of agita-
tion by native Assamese, who fear being
swamped by Bengali-speaking intruders,
the state forced its 33m residents to pro-
duce documents establishing their long-
term residency in India.
Completed in August, this National
Citizens Register excluded some 1.9m in-
habitants as “non-Indians”, who must sub-
mit to special tribunals to appeal against
their status. To the chagrin of Hindu chau-
vinists, it turned out that two-thirds of
these ostensible illegals were in fact Hin-
dus; the claim that millions of Bangladeshi
Muslim migrants had “invaded” Assam
proved to be a myth.
Despite this shortcoming, and despite
the fact that compiling Assam’s list proved
costly and time-consuming for the govern-
ment—not to mention a bureaucratic, legal
and logistical nightmare for citizens—Mr
Shah wants to extend the project nation-
wide. Assuming a cost proportional to
what Assam has spent, this would require
at least $7bn. That does not include the ex-
pense of building detention centres such
as Assam’s growing archipelago of prison
camps, to house thousands of people
judged stateless and stripped of rights.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act may
save some of this money. Since the new law
fast-tracks the route to Indian citizenship
for everyone else, it is primarily Muslims
who are left to be sorted by the National
Citizens Register. Word of this danger is al-
ready spreading. Mosque sermons are
warning the faithful to gather as many offi-
cial documents as they can to serve up to
Mr Shah’s expected bloodhounds.
If, that is, the count goes ahead. Consti-
tutional lawyers believe that inserting a
faith criterion for citizenship contradicts
as many as three articles of the country’s el-
oquently secular constitution. The Indian
Union Muslim League has already ap-
pealed against the law to the Supreme
Court. Many lawyers also contend that
forcing people to produce documentary ev-
idence of their right to be called citizens
tramples on the principle of presumption
of innocence.
It could be, too, that popular resistance
fails to die down. Secular activists, as well
as Muslims, talk of refusing en masseto
comply with any demand to present citi-zenship documents. In Assam and other
states of India’s remote, ethnically com-
plex and historically violence-prone
north-east, the citizenship rules are un-
popular because native Assamese-speak-
ers and numerous tribal groups harbour a
deep fear of being outnumbered in their
own state by other Indians of any religion.
To assuage such worries, Mr Shah exempt-
ed much of the region from the new rules,
even granting one state, Manipur, an archa-
ic status, dating from the time of the Raj,
that obliges visitors from other parts of In-
dia to obtain permits to visit.
Ironically, this sort of exclusionary ar-
rangement is precisely what Mr Modi pro-
claimed he was ending, when in August his
government stripped India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, of its
semi-autonomous status. Four months lat-
er the restive Kashmir Valley, the most pop-
ulous part of the erstwhile state, remains
locked under an internet ban, with its po-
litical leaders under arrest.
In parliament, Mr Shah described the
situation in Kashmir in glowing terms as
peaceful and normal. Perhaps he failed to
notice that by turning citizenship into a
matter of which religion you happen to be
born into, his government has under-
mined India’s strongest claim to legitimate
rule over the disputed territory: that at the
time of Partition its people preferred In-
dia’s broad secular democracy to the con-
stricting Muslim uniformity of Kashmir’s
other claimant, Pakistan.^7I
t was thesort of story that was bound to
cause a sensation. In 2017 the Daily Tele-
graph, one of Australia’s best-selling news-
papers, reported that Geoffrey Rush, an
Oscar-winning actor, had harassed a fe-
male co-star. Mr Rush sued the tabloid’s
parent company, Nationwide News, saying
it had painted him as a “pervert” and “a sex-
ual predator”. The woman in question,
Eryn Jean Norvill, testified that Mr Rush
had made “groping” and “hour-glass” ges-
tures at her, and claimed he deliberately
touched her breast during a production of“King Lear”. Mr Rush denied the allegations
and won the case. In May a judge ordered
the company to pay him damages of
A$2.9m ($2m). It has filed an appeal.
Australia’s press is forced to pay eye-wa-
tering sums with surprising regularity. Last
month a wealthy Queensland family, the
Wagners, won A$3.6m from a commercial
television channel, after it alleged that the
collapse of a wall at a quarry which they
own caused flooding which killed 12 peo-
ple. The Wagners were awarded A$3.8m in a
separate dispute with a radio station lastSYDNEY
The government proposes to water down ferocious libel lawsDefamation in AustraliaPublish and be slammed
Rebel with a reputation