“The country is moving from democracy to dictatorship”: Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien slams the CAB

Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien today said in the Rajya Sabha that the country was moving from “democracy to dictatorship” and said there was an “eerie similarity” between the concentration camps of the Nazi Germany and the detention camps in the Northeast that house people left out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). He was speaking during the debate on the Citizenship Amendment Bill – that was cleared two days ago in the Lok Sabha.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (cleared in the Lok Sabha on Monday with 334 in favour and 106 votes against), seeks to offer citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who entered the country before 2015.

The Trinamool Congress MP said that the over 60 per cent people who had been excluded from the NRC were Bengali Hindus and thus, the segregation was not happening on just religious grounds but also on linguistic grounds.

He referred to laws passed in Nazi Germany which he said have an “eerie similarity with the laws passed today”. “In 1933, there were concentration camps… in 2018 we have detention centres, where 60 per cent are Bengali Hindus,” he said, adding that in 1935, there were citizenship laws to protect people with German blood, and “today we have a faulty bill (referring to the CAB) that wants to define who true Indian citizens are.”

He added that in 1935, one needed an identity to “prove your Aryan lineage” and had an “ancestor pass”, and now one needed a piece of paper to prove one’s Indian citizenship. “In 1940, there was the Madagascar plan to deport Jews, and now we have a plan called the NRC,” he said.

O’Brien said that the Nazis had dehumanised the Jews referring to them as “rats”, and now “the Prime Minister and sometimes the Home Minister uses words such as ‘termites’, ‘vermin’, ‘cockroaches’,” he said. This was a reference to a remark made by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who had addressed a rally saying there were crores of illegal immigrants who were like “termites” eating the food that should go to the country’s poor.

The CAB has been opposed by several parties such as the Congress, Trinamool Congress, Aam Admi Party, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party among others. The Opposition has been saying that it discriminates against Muslims and thus violates Article 14 of the Indian Constitution. The Opposition has thus been calling it “unconstitutional”.

In fact, after the bill was passed in the Lok Sabha, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said that the bill is “a dangerous turn in the wrong direction” and sought sanctions against Union Home Minister Amit Shah and other leaders if it is passed in the Rajya Sabha. The US body said that the CAB enshrines a pathway to citizenship for immigrants that specifically excludes Muslims, setting a legal criterion for citizenship based on religion.