Liberals and many Muslims appear to reject both the Uniform Civil Code and the Citizenship Amendment Act on grounds of encouraging inequality. Rejecting equality in the Uniform Civil Code means insisting on inequality in the future. They are also blind to the historical cultural experience of partition when they think that it was the same for both Muslims and non-Muslims.
The Sanatanis argue otherwise. Historically, there was an unequal cultural experience. Islamic ideals were the basis of Pakistan (east and west). Non-Muslims were declared minorities. On the other hand, Hindus in India become subjects of a secular state where their ideal of Dharma is negated almost on a continuous basis. However, Hindu nationalists, batting for UCC and CAA, accept the history of unequal cultural experience but push for equality in the future.
As Prof. Gangopadhyay (The Majoritarian Myth) explains, the most obvious marker of intolerance is the migration of the victimised groups. In Afghanistan, the Hindu and Sikh population decreased from 7 percent of the total in the second half of the twentieth century to only a few hundred today. At independence, Hindus in West Pakistan and East Pakistan were around 15 percent and 29 percent, respectively, of the total. The numbers are now 2 percent in Pakistan and below 9 percent in Bangladesh. Contrastingly, India after independence has seen a growth of the Muslim population from 9.8 percent at independence to 14.2 percent in 2011. The Hindu proportion has, in fact, shown a decrease. Even Gujarat, allegedly the hub of Muslim persecution, shows a rise in the Muslim population from 8.7 percent in 2001 to 9.7 percent in 2011.
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan were part of the Indian cultural milieu, and after the rise of political Islam, there have been many influxes of refugees from these countries to India. The Citizenship Amendment Act facilitates fast tracking towards citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries persecuted for religious reasons. The United States has the Lautenberg and Specter Amendments, allowing religious minority groups of the former Soviet Union countries and Iran (Jews, Ukrainian Catholics, Greek Orthodox Church, Zoroastrians, and so on) to join their family members in the United States.
Importantly, the CAA is to provide protection to persecuted non-Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh rather than persecution of the existing Muslims in India. It is the unique feature of Sanatana Dharma that the nation is defined by its diversity, and nationalism is to protect this diversity. Only Hinduism, the closest to Sanatana Dharma, can be truly inclusive. India was the hope for all persecuted faiths in the past (Parsis, Syrian Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, Jews), and India is the only hope for the persecuted Hindus. Why should our liberals and Indian Muslim brothers argue against it?
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