Last week, India adopted new legislation called the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gives undocumented immigrants of several faiths a path to citizenship but excludes Muslims, who make up about fifteen per cent of the country’s population. The law is part of a pattern of persecution of Muslims carried out by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, who seek to transform India from an avowedly secular, pluralistic country into a Hindu one. This past August, Modi revoked the autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, and flooded it with troops, in an ongoing siege. In Assam, another state with a large Muslim population, the government implemented the National Register of Citizens, which forced people to prove or lose their citizenship status. Immigrants whose citizenship was stripped by the state are already being sent to detention camps; last month, the government declared that the citizenship registry would soon cover the entire country. The cumulative effect of these moves has been to throw India’s democratic character and future into a precarious state not seen since the mid-nineteen-seventies, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and imprisoned her political opponents.

In response to the Citizenship Amendment Act, demonstrations have broken out across India. Many of them have been met with violence from authorities; several protesters have been killed. To help understand the legislation and the widespread backlash against it, I spoke by phone with Niraja Gopal Jayal, a professor at the Center for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the author of several books on Indian democracy, including “Citizenship and Its Discontents.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed India’s uneven history of religious tolerance, how Modi was able to exploit religious chauvinism, and the greatest challenges facing those who care about the future of liberalism in the country.

Is India facing the most dire threat to its democracy in its seventy-two years of existence?

I am not sure I would say it’s the biggest threat to India’s democracy. I think it’s the biggest threat to India’s self-definition as a nation—the definition that India adopted at independence, which was informed by the values of the movement for freedom from British rule and embodied in the Indian constitution. I think that vision of India, as a secular, inclusive, plural, multicultural democracy, is certainly under threat more than at any previous time.

What specifically is worrying to you about this citizenship legislation? And what might be coming next?

It introduces, for the first time, a religious criterion as a test for citizenship. Obviously, someone who supports it could argue that it only applies to people who are refugees or illegal migrants—it doesn’t apply to existing Indian citizens. That argument has indeed been made, but I think that it is a threat to the idea of Indian citizenship per se. It is, in some senses, a body blow to the constitutional ideal of equality of citizenship regardless of caste, creed, gender, language, and so on. Ours is a secular constitution, and the worry is that the introduction of the religious criterion will yield, effectively, a hierarchy of citizens, a kind of two-tiered, graded citizenship.

The even bigger worry is the introduction of religion as a criterion of citizenship in India, because then you open up the floodgates. Like you said, what’s next? If this gets validated in the courts, the next step is that there will be a national register of Indian citizens, for which the law has existed for several years now. That will be activated, and the promise has been made that it will be completed by 2024, which is the next general election. If the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was just passed the other day, is actually enabling some religious groups to become naturalized citizens, leaving out only one major religious group—that is, Muslims—what the National Register of Citizens would do would be to essentially disenfranchise people, including existing Muslim citizens, but Hindus as well who cannot establish, as per the list of documents that may be required, that they are, in fact, Indian citizens.

In a country like ours, there are very large numbers of poor people who are not lettered, who are undocumented. As has happened in Assam already, you will have large numbers of people, Hindus, Muslims, and others, who are nationals, whose ancestors have lived in this land forever, but who would not have the documents to prove it. You could actually, at the same time, have immigrants who have come in and acquired documents, because that’s the first thing they need to do. You could have non-nationals who have documents and get citizenship, and you could have nationals who are undocumented and are stripped of citizenship. The worry is that the burden of this would fall largely on poor people, and on poor Muslims, because the others could get regularized under the Citizenship Amendment Act. That, in fact, is the sequence of this thing.

What you’re arguing is that we will see what’s happening in Assam start to happen on a nationwide level.

Yeah, that’s correct. That’s the plan that’s been announced, partly also to correct what happened in Assam. It turned out very differently than had been anticipated. 1.9 million people were excluded finally in the last round, and a very large proportion of that 1.9 million actually turned out to be Hindus rather than Muslims. Even those people who have championed the National Register for Citizens in Assam, in a sense, were disappointed and surprised by the outcome. Assam is going to go through this whole exercise yet again when the all-India register takes place.

Some of the people defending the government will say, “Look, in Assam, it wasn’t just to go after Muslims. There were Hindus who were on the list, too. This is about illegal immigration. It’s not about creating a Hindu state or anything like that.” How do you respond to that?

The people who are saying that would have to acknowledge that not all illegal migrants are being treated equally. There is only one group of illegal migrants, the Muslims, who are to be excluded from the language of this amendment. Everybody else is being given fast-track citizenship.

The National Register actually starts with the assumption that all of us, 1.3 billion of us, have to prove that we are citizens. The onus of proving that you’re a citizen lies upon you, and the assumption is that, until proven, you are not a citizen, basically. People of my generation didn’t have birth certificates back in the day. I don’t have a birth certificate. They are a fairly recent invention, and not everyone even today has a birth certificate, unless you’re born in a good hospital in a city. If you’re born in a village, often people are still born at home. Lots of people don’t have the kind of documentation that is needed.

All those who are not Muslims but who are illegal immigrants get regularized and covered by the Citizenship Amendment Act. Who will be left, then? The residue is going to be Muslims, right? Once you have sifted and sorted citizens in this rather malevolent way, the Citizenship Act will cover all illegal migrants except Muslims. The two things go together. What will be left will be simply Muslim immigrants and not others, because others will then have got citizenship through this amendment.