Talk:Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019

Bibliography

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Other persecuted communities

The CAA does not have provisions from giving citizenship to any refugee from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Tibet. Refugees from both of these countries belong to particular ethnicities and are not limited to a single religion. For example, Sri Lankan Tamils also include a large number of Christians and Muslims. Similarly, Rohingya refugees also include Hindus (who in fact face persecution also from the Muslim members of their own community, but that is not relevant to this article). I have made certain changes in the article to reflect this. Bharatiya29 13:32, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

And I have reverted many of them. Sources describing the act discuss these communities as examples of groups experiencing religious discrimination that aren't mentioned by the CAA. Removing mention of their religious identity is misrepresenting these sources, and any arguments about their religious beliefs based on personal knowledge is original research. Vanamonde (Talk) 18:45, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

You are wrong in stating that the sources regarding this act mention the religion of these communities (which would have anyway been factually incorrect as none of them, except the Tibetans, belong to a single religion). Almost all sources and even the critics specify the Sri Lankan refugees as "Sri Lankan Tamils". Senior MP from the DMK (largest Tamil party in the Lok Sabha), T. R. Baalu said this during the LS debate: Sir, there are deficiencies in the Bill. For the past more than 10 years, Sri Lankan Tamils are there, Christians are there, Muslims are there and other people are there. They have been there for more than 10 years. So, that deficiency should be corrected by the Home Minister. That is my point. We are opposing the introduction of the Bill. BJD MP Sarmistha Sethi said: Firstly, Sri Lanka should be included in the Bill as many people belonging to both Hindu and Muslim communities are being harassed and tortured there for decades. Another DNK MP Dayanidhi Maran said: There are Muslims in Sri Lanka who are also part of Tamil Nadu or Tamil Sri Lankans who have been living there. In India for 30 years, they are in our refugee camps. What are you going to do for them? YSRCP MP Midhun Reddy said: We should be accommodating Muslims --be they are from Sri Lanka or Maldives or our other neighbouring countries. and We also have other neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka. We have a lot of Tamilians who have shifted from Sri Lanka to India. Many other critics follow the same pattern: The Hindu, Rediff News, Kamal Hassan, spiritual leader Ravi Shankar. Even the existing article on Wikipedia uses the term "Sri Lankan Tamils" (Sri Lankan Tamils in India#Refugees). Madurai MP Venkatesan said, “India can be considered as the Home for all those oppressed due to religion, who may be Jews, Parsis, Yemeni, Afghans, Tibetans or Bangladeshis.” Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said, We lived up to Swami Vivekananda by giving refuge to Tibetan refugees. In the Rajya Sabha, Kerala MP Abdul Wahab said: However, this Bill has discriminated Tamil Muslims and Hindus in Sri Lanka, and is silent about the world's largest persecuted minorities of contemporary times, Rohingyan refugees in India, and does not speak a word about non-believers who are being persecuted around the world. Andhra MP Keshava Rao said: Rohingyas are there in Myanmar and Sri Lankan Tamils are there who are already there in Tamil Nadu. The Washington Post also doesn't link these communities to ay particular religion: "Besides Afghanistan, asylum seekers in India typically are Tibetans from China, Tamils from Sri Lanka and Rohingya from Myanmar, so if the government intended to aid victims of religious persecution, these countries also would be included in the law." I have made my point sufficiently clear now. Questions and concerns have been raised about the exclusion of Sri Lankan Tamils, Rohingyas, and Tibetans, but they a majority of critics don't limit their argument to any particular religion.

I am also surprised at the way you disregarded the video of the Indian Home Minister speaking during an official Parliamentary debate as "not a source carrying any weight". I used it to describe the government's stand on the Rohingya exclusion and also attributed the comment. Disappointing to see that a senior editor like you is clearly trying to limit the article to only one viewpoint. I have reinstated my edit as I have provided all the necessary explanations. If you still have an issue, kindly sort it out by achieving a consensus on the talk page. Bharatiya29 14:20, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I've removed the religious descriptor of the Tamil people, as the only one that is not firmly attested to by a number of reliable sources. You've not provided any substantive arguments against the others. As the person who introduced those changes recently, you're the one obligated to obtain consensus for them. WP:NPOV requires balancing viewpoints in reliable sources. Amit Shah's statements (or those of Rahul Gandhi, or any other politician) are not reliable sources, and furthermore are primary sources, which we are not permitted to interpret, per WP:NOR. And yet that's what you're doing. Vanamonde (Talk) 15:47, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Situation of Jews & People of Other Religions

Why does the article ignores the position of Jews under the amendment even though it specifically states, "Muslims from those countries were not given such eligibility"? This is unfairly biased. Either, the article should read, "Followers of other religions from those countries..." or the status of Jews and followers of other minority religions should be stated somewhere in the article. Currently, it could be argued that this article is anti-Semitic because it ignores the plight of the Jews.

1.127.104.102 (talk) 07:26, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

The lead of the article is biased and misleading - Support statements are missing

In the current version, the lead of the article is majorly talking about the critics of the CAA Act and fails to mention the support that the Act received.

As many as 1,100 academicians and research scholars from various universities across India and abroad as well as prominent persons have released a statement in support of the amended Citizenship Act. In the statement, the signatories appealed to every section of the society "to exercise restraint and refuse to fall into the trap of propaganda, communalism and anarchism". It also mentions that the current act does not change the criteria of citizenship in any way; it is merely providing a special expedited redress, under special circumstances, for minorities fleeing religious persecution from three specific countries i.e Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. 

Sek2016 (Talk) 12:23, 5 March 2020 (PST)

Please read WP:DUE. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:33, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Vanamonde93 WP:DUE cannot be used to present only one-sided facts in the article lead, but edits like this one do exactly that. WP:MOSLEAD requires leads to be written with a neutral point of view. Bharatiya29 14:24, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Have you read the policy you are citing? NPOV requires balancing the viewpoints of reliable sources. Not pro- and anti-CAA opinions. If reliable sources are supportive of some aspect of the CAA, then our article needs to be too. If reliable sources are critical thereof, then our article is, too. Statements by ministers in parliament are not reliable sources, and get no weight. Please find reliable sources making the claim you wish to add. Vanamonde (Talk) 15:37, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

References

RfC on the "Exclusion of other persecuted communities" section

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I propose that this edit to the "Exclusion of other persecuted communities" section be reinstated. I have presented the reasons for the same at #Other persecuted communities, but it is being continuously reverted by Vanamonde93 for reasons that I find to be invalid. Hence I invite other editors to tell their opinion on this so that a broad consensus can be achieved. Bharatiya29 16:03, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose, obviously. There's two issues with that edit; first, Tibetan and Rohingya refugees are predominantly Buddhist and Muslim, respectively, and are described as such by both the general scholarly literature and by scholarly sources discussing the CAA; for instance, this source, as reliable as one can find, states "It excludes multiple communities that are similarly subjected to religious persecution in neighbouring states, such as Muslim Rohingyas in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, Buddhist Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs in China, among others." Not much room for doubt there. Second, a video of Amit Shah speaking is both unreliable and a primary source. We cannot interpret it, and we cannot give it much weight. If reliable sources have reported on his comments about Rohingyas, that would be usable, but Bharatiya29 insists on using the video, it would seem. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:16, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

You have cherry-picked a source to prove your point. I have presented numerous sources and quotes by the critics of this act. Majority of them don't mention the religion of the religions of these communities. Just because they mostly belong to a particular religion, it doesn't mean that their religion needs to be mentioned when it is not considered relevant by most sources/critics. As far as Amit Shah's statement is considered, how is the government's official clarification on an act that is presented, not relevant here? I have not tried to pass his statement as some sort of hard fact. I attributed it to its speaker. There is no ban on using primary sources on Wikipedia. You are right about the interpretation part; WP:PRIMARY does prohibit the analysis of a statement on the basis of a primary source. If you had a problem with the portion regarding the absence of a land border between India and Rakhine, you should have pointed that out. Anyway, it cannot justify the constant removal of the entire part regarding Shah's statement on the Rohingyas. As far as your point about not giving Shah's statement much weight, I simply see that as an attempt to present only a single viewpoint and that is why I decided to start an RfC. Bharatiya29 16:32, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I have cherry-picked nothing. There are, to the best of my knowledge, five scholarly sources directly discussing this act. These are the highest quality sources we have. One of these mentioned Tibetan refugees, and describes them as Buddhist. Two of them mention Rohingya people (Jayal 2019, "Reconfiguring Citizenship in Contemporary India" is the other) and both describe them as Muslim. There are also literally thousands of other scholarly sources describing the Rohingya as Muslim. With respect to Amit Shah, I asked you to provide a better source. You opened an RfC instead, and accused me of violating a policy which you hadn't read carefully enough, which, incidentally, is a form of casting aspersions. Find a reliable source reporting Shah's views on this subject, and we can include them. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:43, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

How is the video not a reliable source? Anyone with a working knowledge of Hindi can verify that Shah said exactly what was written in the article. I can find other sources to which would say the same, but why should I when there is nothing wrong with the source I provided? As far as sources are concerned, there are numerous sources which explicitly talk about the exclusion of Rohingya Hindus from the CAA: Asia Times, Firstpost, Times of India. Instead of mentioning Rohingya Muslims and Rohingya Hindus separately, they should simply be referred to as Rohingyas. As far as Tibetans are considered, it is a known fact that they are predominantly Buddhists but that is completely irrelevant here. A survey of the few sources which talk about their exclusion should make that amply clear. The links I provided will be a good starting point. Bharatiya29 17:02, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

If there are sources discussing that Rohingya Hindus, too, have been excluded, that's a reason to add that, not to obscure the fact that most Rohingyas are Muslim and are collectively perceived as such by scholars and the news media (as demonstrated by any number of reliable sources). Your inability to understand the problem with the video is quite concerning. A video of any individual speaking is only reliable for verbatim quotes. It cannot be interpreted by a Wikipedia editor, because that is original research, which is what you have engaged in when you added it; it's nature as a primary source makes it unreliable for the commentary you have added. Incidentally, choosing which parts of that speech are significant is also interpretation, and also original research. That's why you need a secondary source. Please go find one. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:55, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose - Without a secondary source dealing with Amit Shah's arguments, this RfC should not even have been filed! The other issues are equally tendentious. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:14, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Unjustified reversals / undos

I would like to draw the attention to these two undo edits: 1 & 2.

With regard to 1, the edit was undone with the subject "that is an opinion, not info; See the section on "The Amendments" to see why it is wrong". A cursory glance of "The Amendments" section reveals quotes from the "Foreigners Act, 1946" NOT this Act itself. For further 100% clarity one can read the full Act itself here.

Further regard to 2, documenting the reactions of notable minority leaders (who are possibly part of the 'persecuted sections' as often asserted) of the neighbouring countries and their cultural organization is a fact - revealed in the sources - not personal opinions. Therefore, original text also needs to be restored here. --Hindustanilanguage (talk) 19:21, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the first edit "persecution", search for that word in the archives of this page. Please note that your source was an opinion column. As per WP:NEWSORG it is only good for attributed statements, and, in a contentious page, you need WP:CONSENSUS to use it at all.

The second edit inserted Pakistani Hindu Council's statements, in the section meant for the "Analysis" of the Act. That is not the place for it. Please feel free to put it under Pakistan's reactions or something. The Hindu Council hasn't bothered to explain why Pakistani Hindus are still streaming into India saying that they don't want to go back. It is a political statement as far as I am concerned, and it should be treated as such. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 19:35, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

For 1, I suggest you read the full Act itself here - there is no mention of "persecution". --Hindustanilanguage (talk) 19:44, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

The law is a WP:PRIMARY source. You have to use reliable sources to interpret it. You haven't said whether you have read the archives of the talk page. We are not going to sit here and debate all over again issues that have been settled a long time ago. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 21:06, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

The reaction of Pakistan Hindu Council can probably be put in this section Citizenship_(Amendment)_Act,_2019#Refugees, with the title being changed to "Religious minorities and refugees". As Kautilya mentioned some Hindus have fled Pakistan for India and this fact is mentioned in the same section. Refugees are basically "religious minorities" until they cross the border.Bless sins (talk) 23:33, 23 May 2020 (UTC)