Reader JohnC had an interesting question for me from the Mondaydact Browser Crash for this week:

Hey Didact, what are your thoughts on the Indian bill on citizenship? No Muslim can apply.

The article that he references in his question can be found here, and I’m going to excerpt the relevant bits now to give you a good idea of what is going on:

Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in India’s lower house amid raucous debate. Opposition parties stood against the proposed law that would, for the first time, create a legal pathway to grant Indian nationality on the basis of religion.

The bill was originally introduced in 2016 during the Modi government’s first term but lapsed after protests and an alliance partner’s withdrawal. It proposes to grant Indian citizenship to non-Muslims who came to India from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan before 2015.

Oppositions politicians inside parliament, and protesters in several Indian cities, said the bill discriminated against Muslims and violated India’s secular constitution.

Shah and Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which had included the CAB as part of its manifesto in the last general election, insist that it is necessary.

“In these three countries, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis and Christians, followers of these six religions have been tormented,” Shah said, before the bill was tabled after a vote.

[…]

After going through the lower house of parliament, where the BJP has a majority, the bill has to be okayed by the upper house, where the ruling party does not have enough votes for passage. Any bill needs to be ratified by both houses of India’s parliament to become law.

The bill has indeed sparked massive protests across India, particularly in the border states of West Bengal, Assam, Gujarat, and to a much lesser extent Rajasthan and Punjab. But all of these protests and all of these letters from academics and scientists and whatnot, are nothing more than distractions.

The clues about the real motivation behind this law are to be found in the quotes that I highlighted above.

The first quote is pure wizardry, nothing more and nothing less. I have no clue who this Amit Shah character is, but it’s worth noting that his last name indicates that he is a Muslim himself – though in India this is not a hard-and-fast rule. Let’s be clear about one thing: the Hindu nationalists who currently rule over India care almost nothing whatsoever for non-Hindu religious minorities, either within or outside of India.

The religious minorities in India actually make up a substantial portion of the population – about 20% or thereabouts. Roughly 14% of India is Muslim, about 2% is Christian, another 2% or so is Sikh, a further 1% is Buddhist, and the Parsis, Jains, Jews (yes, really) and others make up the remainder. But the overwhelming majority is entirely Hindu.

The Muslim nations specifically referenced in the bill in question have tiny non-Muslim minorities. All of those non-Muslim minorities are heavily persecuted. Christians in Pakistan face daily and extreme persecution, just as they do in Bangladesh. If there are any serious Christians left in Afghanistan, I would be quite amazed.

That does not mean that Indians in general give the minutest quantum of a flying weaselpecker’s posterior about the fate of those minorities. Nor do they want to give those people Indian citizenship.

India already has a serious problem with illegal immigration – and, unlike most Western countries, actually spends an enormous amount of its military resources to defend its own borders and prevent illegal aliens from crossing. Bangladesh is the primary source of these illegals, and quite a few of them can be found crossing the, quite porous, India-Bangladesh border and coming over to cities like Calcutta to take advantage of medical facilities and job opportunities (y’know, such as they are in a shithole city) that they could not get back in Dhaka so on.

Now, let’s put things into perspective a little bit.

Indian laws and crackdowns against illegal aliens have either made stateless or turned into lawbreakers, very roughly 4 million people. That’s a pretty big number – it’s about the population of Singapore. Most of those are Muslims that India doesn’t want within its borders.

And it’s less than 0.3% of the entire Indian population of very roughly 1.3 BILLION people.

The direction that India is taking here is very clear. The country’s Hindu nationalist government intends to ensure that Islam is completely neutered as a religion and political force. This is not in the least bit surprising if you know or understand anything about the 800-year history of Islam in India. That history is spectacularly violent and bloody and involves centuries of repression, coercion, torture, rape, murder, enslavement, and bloodshed.

It also happens to include some of the greatest achievements in Indian cultural, scientific, and technological advancement.

The Mughals who swept in from India’s northwestern borders and conquered most of the modern subcontinental landmass were basically Turko-Afghano-Mongols, which is to say that their genetic stock derives from the very same peoples who rode with Genghis Khan and conquered almost the entire known world. A splinter group of the Great Khan’s horde made their way to Turkey and Afghanistan, converted to Islam, and proceeded to migrate east and south until they made their way into India. Their cavalry tactics helped them conquer the Indian subcontinent and established a great and powerful empire there, one that lasted roughly 500 years until the Brits came by and kicked over their tea-wagon.

During that time, the Mughals did pretty much exactly what Islamic rulers always do – which is to say, they alternated between periods of “toleration of and peace with the pagans” and periods of “f***ing lunatic NUTBALLS in charge”. The latter periods saw so many millions of Hindus slaughtered that there are still to this day some serious blood-feuds between Hindus and Muslims all across the subcontinent.

Hindus insist that Muslims razed their holiest temple sites and raised mosques over them. That is true. They did.

Muslims respond by saying that the sites in question have been in Muslim hands for centuries, and it hardly seems fair to try to make a big deal about it now. And that also is true.

But there is no getting past the fact that Hindus outnumber Muslims by over 4-to-1 in the subcontinent.

And that is the true purpose of this citizenship bill.

It has absolutely no chance of becoming actual law in India. The bill itself has to pass both the lower house of Parliament, where the ruling BJP coalition has a massive majority, and the upper house, where the BJP has no such majority. The bill will be stopped in the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, as it is known.

So the reactions by the usual suspects from the numpties in the International Community Of The Ever So Caring And Sensitive – ICOTESCAS, with thanks to LTC Tom Kratman – which essentially consist of much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about how this bill discriminates against Muslims, are totally overblown and quite pointless.

The point of this bill was never to give real citizenship to anybody.

Think about it for a moment. India’s passport is USELESS. It allows you to travel to a lot of other shithole countries in the Dirt World, most notably in Africa, visa-free. But the moment that you want to go anywhere nice, like Europe or South America or Russia or much of Southeast Asia, you can’t do it. (Indonesia is a nice exception to this rule, by the way – but Indonesia is very welcoming to just about EVERYONE.)

So what, exactly, does anyone stand to gain coming from Bangladesh or Afghanistan or Pakistan by getting an Indian passport? Yeah, it’s a less shitty passport, perhaps, but it’s still pretty shitty.

Again, remember: the point of this bill is not to give Indian citizenship to anyone. The total number of minority individuals affected by this bill is TINY. It’s less than 1% of India’s entire current population.

The people doing the protesting about the possibility of seeing lots of non-Indians flooding into India’s borders are indeed completely missing the point. That isn’t going to happen because this bill isn’t going to pass into law.

What is going to happen – what is already happening – is that a very clear, extremely pointed message is going out to the Muslim communities of India.

It says, very simply: “F*** OFF. GET OUT. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE”.

It basically says, “India is for Hindus”.

The reason why the pointy-headed academic types are protesting and getting all hot and bothered about this is because they operate under the delusion, and that is what it is, that India is a beacon of tolerance, diversity, and religious moderation. These qualities have certainly been visible in India at specific times within its history, but overall, India’s identity is inseparable from Hinduism.

All other religions and faiths that try to exist in India, have to fight against the immense weight and pressure of Hinduism and its incredibly confusing mass of internal contradictions, problems, nonsense, epicycles, and incomprehensible texts.

Hinduism is a very weird religion in a lot of ways if you actually stop to analyse it. The entire faith basically comes down to a pick-and-choose tailor-made set of interactions with aspects of greater Truth, designed to make you, the individual, as happy as possible with your own life.

That is its great appeal, and also its great downfall.

Because Hinduism claims to embrace all of the aspects and personalities of God, Hindus do not believe that they have anything to learn from anyone else. They do not tolerate Christians preaching to them about the truth of God the Father of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who is Lord and King, because as far as they are concerned, Jesus simply taught a different version of things that Hindu sages and priests taught centuries earlier, using different words in a different language.

That they are totally wrong about this makes not one whit of difference to them. As far as they are concerned, Christianity has nothing to offer to them.

Other faiths that have spun out of Hinduism, most notably Buddhism, have done so because of actual weaknesses and problems with the faith itself. Buddhism flourishes outside of India throughout most of Southeast and East Asia, which largely used to be Hindu once upon a time – but in India itself, Buddhism is not taken particularly seriously, even though it is tolerated and left largely in peace. And that is because Hinduism has adapted and changed and moved with the times as necessary in order to preserve itself.

With Islam, however, Hinduism finally met an opponent that it could not subsume into itself, and could not adapt to meet its needs. And that is why Islam ended up conquering Hinduism, and why Muslims ended up slaughtering tens of millions of Hindus over the course of a 500-year occupation.

All of that history and religious context has led to the bill in question, which has sparked off such intense protests – mostly over basically nothing.

Once more – this law will not pass. It will not go on the books. What will happen, however, is that anti-Muslim measures will be ramped up significantly, and Muslims in India are going to find themselves in a serious pickle.

You see, Muslims in India don’t see themselves as anything other than Indian. They’ve lived in India for generations. They speak the local languages – they don’t speak Arabic or Farsi. Their birthplace is India. Their history is in India. Their blood is Indian. Their race is the same as that of their Hindu brethren. Their culture is basically the same. The one major difference between them and Hindus is simply their religion.

And, in the era of nationalism, that difference alone is now enough to cast out a substantial portion of a nation’s population.

India’s voter base is making it very clear that, as far as they are concerned, India is for Hindus. They elected the BJP and Shiv Sena and other Hindu nationalist parties into power precisely because those same parties promised that they would make Hindu identity and nationhood the very core of their platform.

Will Christian nations follow suit and start expelling Muslims and Jews from their midst?

I wouldn’t bet against it. Christian nations have expelled Jews in the past – England, France, Spain, and Russia all did this repeatedly. And, quite contrary to what Jews in the (((media))) might like you to believe, all of these nations actually flourished after doing so.

I do not say that I want to see India kicking people out on the basis of religion alone. Once that particular genie is let out of the bottle, there is no telling what kind of damage it will do. Muslims in India already know quite well that if they misbehave, they will be lynched – I’m not making that up, it’s actually a common occurrence in India. So, in general, they behave, because they have to. I do not think that it is a good idea to kick out a group of people that is so thoroughly embedded within every stratum of Indian society.

The kind of wrenching change that the Hindu nationalists want is almost certain to backfire upon them. But it is their right to choose that destiny, and if they want to do something that could potentially be very stupid, then that is up to them.