Proceedings of The 15th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
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India’s Citizenship Politics: Re-Enacting Partition’s Tragedy
Zuchamo Nsungbemo Ezung, Ph. D, Mhonthung Yanthan, Ph. D
ABSTRACT:
The partition of India in August 1947 had tragically divided the India’s subcontinent into two nations. While the immediate fallout of partition was that it had divided people on communal-religious line leading to the displacement of millions of Indians and led to the outbreaks of one of worst form of communal violence in human history claiming millions of lives, the partition also created a long-term socio-political crisis, a humanitarian-refugees crisis, that continue to affect the life of the whole of India’s subcontinent to this day. The whole partition exercise in the Indian subcontinent had left the survivors traumatized leaving a permanent scar in their minds. The partition had also left many Indians, belonging to different religious groups, become minorities in their own land and those minorities, Muslims in India and Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and their posterity become subject to constant religious persecutions in their own native land. This paper examines the controversy and crisis over the latest Indian government attempts to grant citizenship in the country to those religious minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and how this Citizenship issue in India could create another partition-like situation in the subcontinent seven decades after the tragic process of partition of India.
keywords: Citizenship, India, Partition, Refugees Crisis, Religious Minorities