The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2019 marks secular India’s first firm step towards its transformation into a Hindu Rashtra. CAB is a logical first prerequisite in the BJP’s bigger game plan to render Muslims as second-class citizens. A pan-Indian National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise will selectively exclude those the Sangh Parivar don’t want to be regarded as Indian citizens.

In a country where proving one’s identity is an expensive affair, it is going to affect the poor people most. This was the fundamental argument for the Aadhaar project. Those who are migrant labourers and landless peasants with no land ownership records to show are the most vulnerable.

In Assam, most of the six lakh Bengali-speaking Muslims and 13 lakh Bengali-speaking Hindus left out of the NRC register are poor people who could not produce legacy documents. This had created apprehensions in the minds of even Bengali Hindus who came from Bangladesh. That is why CAB has been brought in to alleviate their fears and turn them into a loyal vote bank.