“Miyan log ko humre niche rahna hoga, nahi toh maarenge saala log ko. Ee desh hindu ka hai”—Muslim people will have to live under us, else we will beat them up. This country is of the Hindus—Amit Kumar, in his late twenties, said to me with pride. Kumar works for a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Dumka, a district in Jharkhand.
On 12 December, I travelled to several villages deep in the interior of the Santhal Pargana division, one of five administrative divisions in Jharkhand. It was the day after the Rajya Sabha passed the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019. The bill, now an act, states that members of six communities—Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian—from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh, will not be treated as illegal immigrants, if they entered India on or before 31 December 2014. The act paves the way for them to gain Indian citizenship. Notably, Muslim migrants from these countries will not be entitled to the benefits under the act.
At the start of our journey, Kumar told me that there was no Hindu-Muslim dispute in the region, and all communities co-existed peacefully. Muslims form nearly 14 percent of the electorate in the state. However, after a few hours of traveling and speaking to locals, something changed. As he heard critical opinions about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 by members of the Muslim community, he became furious. Soon, he started talking about how Muslims could not dare to touch a Hindu man like him.
A five-phase assembly election is currently underway in Jharkhand. The fourth phase concluded on 16 December, and the fifth phase will be held on 20 December. My conversations with Muslim voters revealed that the passage of the CAA has angered the community in Jharkhand, and triggered fear and anxiety. Muslim voters who supported the Bharatiya Janata Party earlier said they would now vote against the party. Nearly fifty kilometres away from Jharkhand’s Dumka district headquarters, is the Ranishwar block. The block is part of the Shikaripada assembly constituency and shares its border with the state of West Bengal. Broken roads lead into these villages and the houses are made mostly of mud. I visited the Muslim neighbourhood of the block’s Ektala village. The first person I met was 67-year-old Nur-Islam-Khan, a small-scale farmer who knew about the CAA.
“The Muslims who have migrated from countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan will not be allowed to live in India anymore,” Khan told me, describing his perception of the act. He does not use a smartphone and all his information is based on news from radio and Hindi news channels on television.
Khan told me, “Possibly after this, the BJP will bring another law to throw us of out of the country.” He added, “We are native residents of Jharkhand and have nothing to do with the Muslims of Bangladesh or Pakistan. But BJP will continue to bring new laws to make India a Hindu Rashtra and to torture Muslims.” Khan is not alone in this perception. Muslims across the state echoed similar sentiments.
In Parshimla village, part of the Dumka assembly constituency, members of the minority community, across age groups and occupations, said that the voting choice of Muslims in their village had changed after the CAA was passed. “The passage of a single bill has changed our voting choice overnight,” a 38-year-old-official, who works with the Jharkhand legislative assembly, told me, on the condition of anonymity. “This bill is discriminatory against Muslims and indicates a larger threat looming upon us.”
Residents of Parshimla village told me that some members of the Muslim community in the village had voted for the BJP during the 2014 and 2019 general elections. The majority had voted for the Congress or the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. “Until yesterday, this village and surrounding Muslim villages had several households bearing the BJP’s flag,” Abdul Ansari, a 44-year-old brick businessman from the adjoining village, said. “They have vanished overnight.”
Johat Miyan, a 64-year-old voter in the Dumka assembly constituency, showed me pictures of him joining the BJP ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Miyan is a member of the Muslim community and owns a bangle shop. However, after the CAB was tabled in the Rajya Sabha, he decided to quit the party. He has now joined the JMM, the principal opposition party in Jharkhand.
I also spoke to Tabrez Alam, a 55-year-old professor who teaches Arabic at the Sido Kanhu Murmu University in Dumka. He said that members from the Muslim community have had different reasons to join or support the BJP. “When Modi ji said that he wants to see Quran in one hand of Muslims and a computer in another, a chunk of Muslims had started supporting him,” Alam said, referring to a comment the prime minister Narendra Modi made in February 2018 at an event on Islamic heritage. But that support base is dwindling.
The CAA has likely impacted the fifteen assembly constituencies that voted in the fourth phase of the elections on 16 December. It will probably also influence voting in the remaining 16 seats that will go to the polls on 20 December. Assembly constituencies such as Jamtara, Poreyahat, Shikaripada, Godda, Pakur, Sindri and Madhupur have a sizeable Muslim population. If the votes of the tribal and Muslim communities in these constituencies align against the BJP, it could turn the electoral contest in favour of the opposition. However, the CAA may have polarised voters in Jharkhand along religious lines. Consequently, it might strengthen a Hindu consolidation in favour of the BJP.
The JMM, Congress, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal are fighting the assembly polls in alliance and have formed what they call the Mahagatbandhan, or grand alliance. Hemant Soren, the JMM working president is the face of the Mahagatbandhan against the incumbent BJP. “The BJP talks about Gandhi and acts on the lines of Hitler,” Soren told me, while talking about the CAA. He added, “If we are elected to power, we will read, analyse and review the CAB to find out whether it is in benefit of the state or not. Also, we were not in a position to do much earlier,”—during the passage of the Bill—“but the act can certainly be challenged in the state.”
Meanwhile, members of the minority community in the state told me that they are looking for an effective political leadership through which they can channelise their anger against the CAA. Further, there seemed to be a disconnect between urban and rural members of the Muslim community.
Urban Muslims I spoke to in Jharkhand seemed to suggest that those living in the state’s villages would not be aware of the CAA or the National Register of Citizens. “The farming community or those living villages don’t have much exposure,” AR Khan, the head of the government-aided MG Degree College in the Ranishwar block of Sikaripada constituency, told me. “They can’t understand or gather information about CAB or NRC.”
However, I encountered the opposite in several villages across the fifty kilometre stretch between Dumka district headquarters and the Shikaripada constituency. In each village, members from the farming community had heard of the CAA. They described it as a new citizenship law that will not allow “Muslims migrants” from neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to get Indian citizenship. They perceived the law as setting a trend for things to come. Many believed that the CAA is a precursor to a nation-wide implementation of the NRC. Several feared for the future, and wondered what would happen to Muslims in a state like Jharkhand where many from the community do not have land rights and access to education. “I do have land and hence I can show documents to prove that I am an Indian,” Motalib Khan, a 48-year-old resident of the Ranishwar block, told me. “But many from my community are landless and uneducated, who don’t even bother about government documents such as voter IDs.”
Back in Dumka, while discussing the CAA and the NRC, Alam pointed to the pattern of colours used to paint his two-storey house—the Indian flag’s tricolour. “Our home minister wants Muslims to prove that we are Indians,” he said. “What could be the bigger proof than this?” He suddenly called his younger daughter Sadaf and asked her to recall the night India had lost the cricket world cup semi-final in 2019. “My sister and I were crying and didn’t even eat that night,” she told me. A few days ago, Sadaf’s elder sister Sanower prepared a list of the family lineage. The family keeps it handy now. They said they have started keeping track of all documents in the event that they need to prove that they are Indians.