The CAA and NRC are designed to work together to strip citizenship from Indian muslims who do not have documents to comprehensively prove citizenship.
The NRC is terrible but not overtly discriminatory on religious grounds. The CAA essentially protects people from the NRC, but does so in a blatantly discriminatory manner.
How it works: You might have a passport or driving license or Aadhaar, but none of these prove you are a citizen; you need a document issued before the 1970 wave of immigration from Bangladesh, and if you are younger than that you need to prove an ancestor's citizenship using such a document and then prove your descent from that person using birth certificates.
Needles to say, many people (of all religions) would not be able to do that.
This is where the CAA comes in, saying people in the country illegally have a fast-track to citizenship if they happen to be from a list of 'persecuted minorities' in neighboring countries. The list excludes persecuted muslim groups, most conspicuously the Rohingya of Myanmar who face the most horrifying persecution.
Sidenote: while I said the NRC isn't discriminatory in it's framing, it was in practice in Assam, the only state where it has been enforced. Officers have broad discretion over choosing whom to challenge (to prove citizenship), and some were caught admitting they challenged people based on how hey dressed and in what neighborhood they lived.
The National Register of Citizens (NRC). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Register_of_Citizen...
The CAA and NRC are designed to work together to strip citizenship from Indian muslims who do not have documents to comprehensively prove citizenship.
The NRC is terrible but not overtly discriminatory on religious grounds. The CAA essentially protects people from the NRC, but does so in a blatantly discriminatory manner.
How it works: You might have a passport or driving license or Aadhaar, but none of these prove you are a citizen; you need a document issued before the 1970 wave of immigration from Bangladesh, and if you are younger than that you need to prove an ancestor's citizenship using such a document and then prove your descent from that person using birth certificates.
Needles to say, many people (of all religions) would not be able to do that.
This is where the CAA comes in, saying people in the country illegally have a fast-track to citizenship if they happen to be from a list of 'persecuted minorities' in neighboring countries. The list excludes persecuted muslim groups, most conspicuously the Rohingya of Myanmar who face the most horrifying persecution.
Sidenote: while I said the NRC isn't discriminatory in it's framing, it was in practice in Assam, the only state where it has been enforced. Officers have broad discretion over choosing whom to challenge (to prove citizenship), and some were caught admitting they challenged people based on how hey dressed and in what neighborhood they lived.