The 20s are the new 30s.

The NRC seems like the most fascist thing on the table, but it does seem like a sign of its being highly controversial enough that Modi has denied talking about it - contradicting the Home Minister. (So, maybe in more like 5-10 years.)

1. The current law as passed is explicitly for the benefit of refugees from legally persecuted minorities in neighboring Islamic countries. Muslim citizens of these countries enjoy greater legal rights, and such migrants to India are usually economic migrants.

2. I don't see how this is a fascist law. The US has similar laws favoring specific religious minorities. There is serious and systematic persecution of non Muslim minorities in the countries covered by this law. It has no bearing on citizens of India.

3. India, as any other country, is under no obligation to give consideration to anyone who is a citizen of other nations; and is free to choose the terms by which they are granted citizenship.

4. The NRC has not been implemented except in Assam, which was an exercise mandated by the Supreme Court of India. The terms of the nationwide population register are not established yet, and this has little to do with the recent law.

#3
I forgot to mention that the persecution I mentioned in 3) have legal sanction in these countries (I.e these are explicitly Islamic states with corresponding distribution of rights to citizens).

[I was going to rebut Anon anon. What happened in the last couple of hours?]

There was a horrendous burst of comment spam. Did something worthwhile get junked?

I'm not sure. It was anonymous and possibly bad faith but talked like a human.

3.1, 4: As noted in OP link, this explanation is transparently false. The CAA extends no protection to Muslims similarly persecuted in Buddhist Sri Lanka and Myanmar, nor to persecuted Muslim sects in Muslim countries. By far the simplest explanation is that the government doesn't want to grant citizenship to Muslims.
3.3: Many of the people in question aren't citizens of other nations. The currently most consequential group are people in the Northeast descended from refugees or migrants from present day Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of these people were born and raised in India. Bangladesh denies that they are citizens of Bangladesh; many of their forebears arrived in India before Bangladeshi independence, hence before Bangladeshi citizenship existed. The combination of NRC and CAA wouldn't just deny Indian citizenship to foreign citizens, it would render stateless hundreds of thousands of de facto permanent Indian residents.
For a sense of how arbitrary that would be, consider

Usually, to gain Indian citizenship by naturalization, a person needs to live in India for at least 11 of the previous 14 years.

Is Kashmir still locked down?

#3 Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka are not discriminated in law. Similarly Hindu and Christian refugees from Sri Lanka are excluded from this law. For other countries I refer to 3) unless you believe that any refugee law made to give relief for one or a few groups is discriminatory if it does not include all persecuted groups. There is a historical context also in that these 3 countries were a consequence of partition (not all of Afghanistan, but parts of it were involved in partition)

As far as the issue in Assam goes, the NRC exercise there is not due to this government; but rather a legacy of the Assam accords of 1985, and court ordered. There is general consensus (even with the ruling bjp in assam) that it was a mess. A lot of the people caught up in it are as you said, Indian citizens. Again, the terms of any corresponding nationwide exercise are not laid out.

Yes, we all know the only thing you can look at is what's written down in the law.

10: Mate, if a law discriminates among otherwise similar groups on grounds of religion, then what you have there is a discriminatory law.

3. India, as any other country, is under no obligation to give consideration to anyone who is a citizen of other nations; and is free to choose the terms by which they are granted citizenship.

Yep. And we are free to call those terms "discriminatory". Which is what they are. If Australia decides that white immigrants from the UK get citizenship after two years' residence, and other immigrants from the UK have to wait ten years, then Australia is free to make that decision: the terms of Australian citizenship are Australia's to decide. It is still a discriminatory decision. If an Ahmadi Muslim suffers religious persecution in Pakistan and flees to India, the BJP doesn't want her to get citizenship. If a Hindu or a Christian suffers similar persecution, the BJP wants them to have citizenship. This is discrimination. And it's coming from a party that has a strong record of not liking Muslims - which doesn't incline me to give them the benefit of whatever poppy-seed-sized elements of doubt you may be able to dredge up.

And, I should add, it is classic fascist reasoning to elide three important distinctions:

the distinction between "it is legal for me to do this" and "it is morally acceptable for me to do this";

the distinction between "no one will stop me doing this" and "it is legal and moral for me to do this";

and the distinction between "it is legal for me to do this" and "no one should criticise me for doing this".

You do all three of those.

Co-sign all of ajay's comments in this thread.

I haven't been able to bring myself to follow the India stuff too closely, since I have to live and breathe terrible US immigration policy every day, but he's completely, 100% on the mark by everything I know.

And if the BJP doesn't like being associated with fascists, then it could always stop hanging out with all those guys who do paramilitary training, have massive parades, were inspired by Fascists, hate foreigners, are obsessed with racial and religious purity, murder people who support pacifism and inter-racial harmony, conduct pogroms against ethnic and religious minorities, and wear paramilitary uniforms.

(Hilariously, though, they wear brown shorts rather than brown shirts.
"Footer bags, you mean?"
"Indeed, sir."
"How perfectly vile!")

To be fair, it's a warm climate.

16 is to shorts, not the other stuff.

#12, this is exactly what the US does in deciding citizenship eligibility and I think the UK does this too. Nationality of origin determines the ease of getting citizenship in the US. And there is this law in the US:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/06/the-lautenberg-amendment/

Thanks for the enlightening comments on fascism and morality. I guess the above law in the US would count as fascist by your standards? however I doubt that this has faced any serious condemnation. I wonder whether you find it morally repugnant too.

Finally the CAA does not prevent Ahmadis or any others not covered from applying for citizenship upon fleeing from persecution or otherwise wanting citizenship in India; just like the US allows
for people to apply for refugee status.

"this is exactly what the US does in deciding citizenship eligibility and I think the UK does this too."

This is a lie. The UK does not take religion into account when making decisions on granting citizenship. To my knowledge, the US does not do so either.
Your link is irrelevant as it refers to granting refugee status, not to granting citizenship.
Your final paragraph is also irrelevant.

"Thanks for the enlightening comments on fascism and morality."

My pleasure. I can't imagine you need much help with the former!

Hilariously, though, they wear brown shorts rather than brown shirts

Sadly, they seem to have switched to dark-taupe trousers.

Also launched their own Internet Research Agency, it seems from this.

"Sadly, they seem to have switched to dark-taupe trousers."

Aww. Does this mean I have to ditch my plan of sneaking up to Narendra Modi and muttering in his ear that I know all about Eulalie?

19.2: Yeah. The US uses national origin quotas to determine who can get a visa to immigrate here, or under Trump (spit) whether certain national origins are eligible for visas at all, but once one is legally resident here for the requisite number of years, AFAIK, the process to gain naturalization is the same for everyone.

23. Not the same for everyone, no, and just being here legally for a long time carries no weight for huge numbers of people. H1B is much easier to get than a green card, and the national origin quotas for green cards mean that there are many primarily Indian and Chinese nationals in bureaucratic hell. Reforms proposal bills are stuck. Basically, the US opposition to immigration is making life here worse.
This is completely separate from the more tenuous legal status (called TPS) and subsequent indefinite limbo of central americans. There are millions of these in the US. Roughly all food and a whole lot of construction on the east coast are the outcome of central american labor, but there is no requisite number of years of feeding and housing the rest of the people here that will serve as a qualification.

My Sri Lankan Muslim coworker hasn't been home on leave since the 2019 Easter bombings, and he's terrified for his family back home.

Ajay are you sure the BJP is more OK with Christians than they are with Muslims? My Christian Indian co-worker seems convinced otherwise.

#19,

Please note that I was responding to your example of what would be discriminatory: US immigration rules are discriminatory by nationality, and from what I hear from people in England, it is the case there too.

The CAA also grants refugee status; the people who benefit from it have had to wait between 5-6 years. Refugee status in the us means eligibility for citizenship after 5 years as far as I know, so how is this any different? it is convenient that you don't address the fact that the law I refer to in the US also uses a religious test.

The relevant us asylum rules:

" Can an asylee become a us citizen?
In order for a refugee to become a citizen, he or she must be in the United States for at least five years and have permanent residence for at least five years. ... The time that the refugee spends in the United States as a permanent resident will go toward the five years' requirement for naturalization."

This is weird. I know very little about India but I know a fair bit about unfogged. So far as I know, we did not used to have anybody who talked much about India. But then it never used to come up very often.

I don't know anything about India, but it does seem to me that a Cold War era law lowering the burden of proof for oppressed religious minorities from Communist countries seeking refugee status isn't exactly what we mean when we say that a law amounts to religious discrimination. Congress directed the AG to establish one or more categories of aliens who are or were nationals and residents of the Soviet Union and who share common characteristics that identify them as targets of persecution in the Soviet Union on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion and further said that Jews, Ukrainian Catholics, and Ukrainian Orthodox meet this definition.

10: As you neglect to mention, Rohingyas in Myanamar are discriminated against in law, having been denied citizenship since 1962. AIUI that discrimination is based in ethnicity, not religion; most Rohingyas are however Muslim, and would be excluded by the CAA. I don't know if non-Buddhists are discriminated against in law Sri Lanka, but they are sufficiently discriminated against in fact that 100,000 of them have fled to India. They too would be denied citizenship under the CAA.

27: discrimination by nationality is not the same thing. All countries discriminate by nationality. That's pretty much the definition of a country. It is dishonest to conflate that with anti-Muslim discrimination.

26: more that there are so few Christians they are less worth getting the brownshorts (or rather browntrousers) worked up about.

Republican impeachment manager at 11:00 AM: "That's all we have for today," (paraphrase). You can hear the shame. It's delicious.

Republican talking points are stored in the butt. Prove me wrong.