Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday addressed an election rally for his Hindu nationalist party after another day of violent clashes between police and protesters demonstrating against a new citizenship law that excludes Muslims.
Twenty-three people have been killed nationwide in the protests since the law was passed in parliament earlier this month.
Most of the deaths have occurred in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 20 percent of the state’s 200 million people are Muslim. Police have denied any wrongdoing.
Photo: AP
Among the 15 people killed in the state was an eight-year-old boy who died in a stampede, police said.
Authorities have scrambled to contain the situation, banning public gatherings and blocking Internet access.
Modi took the stage at a rally launching his Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign for New Delhi legislative assembly elections in February.
He urged a sea of supporters to chant: “Unity in diversity is India’s specialty.”
He also asked people in the crowd to “stand up and show respect for elected members of parliament, the decision to pass the CAB,” or the Citizenship Amendment Bill.
Anger has been growing over the law, approved by parliament on Dec. 11, which gives religious minority members from three neighboring countries an easier path to citizenship — but not if they are Muslim.
Critics have said the law discriminates against Muslims and is part of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda, a claim his party denies.
More than 7,000 people have either been detained under emergency laws or arrested for rioting, according to several state police officials.
Uttar Pradesh police said they have arrested 705 people involved in the protests.
However, the arrests have done nothing to stop the spread of demonstrations across the country.
Protests were held on Saturday in numerous states, including in the cities of Chennai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Kolkata and Guwahati.
As day broke in the capital, New Delhi, demonstrators held up their mobile phones as torches outside India’s biggest mosque, Jama Masjid, in a show of dissent.
In Patna, in the eastern state of Bihar, three demonstrators sustained gunshot wounds and six others were wounded in a stone-throwing clash with counterprotesters, police said.
At an all-women protest in Guwahati, in the northeastern state of Assam — where the wave of protests started amid fears the immigrants would dilute the local culture — participants said it was time to speak up.
“We came out to fight for our motherland, we came to fight without any arms and ammunition, we will fight peacefully,” Lily Dutta told reporters.
Since being re-elected this year, Modi and his party have stripped Muslim-majority Kashmir of its autonomy and carried out a register of citizens in Assam, a state with a large Muslim population.
The BJP has said it wants to conduct the National Register of Citizens nationwide, fueling fears that Muslims — a 200-million minority in India — are being disenfranchised.
BJP General Secretary Bhupender Yadav told reporters on Saturday that the party would “launch an awareness campaign” and hold 1,000 rallies to dispel “lies” about the law.
Police raised barricades along Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, an avenue that in the past few years has been a hotspot for protests.
It came after street battles broke out in the city late on Friday, when protesters throwing stones and chanting anti-Modi slogans clashed with baton-wielding police, who deployed a water cannon to disperse the crowd.
An Agence France-Presse reporter at the scene saw protesters, including children, being detained and beaten by police.
More than 45 people were injured in the violence.
Forty people were taken into custody, including at least eight under 18 years old, police told reporters on Saturday, adding that most of them were released.
However, sixteen others were arrested on charges of violence, a spokesman said.
Delhi’s chief metropolitan magistrate late on Friday ordered the release of everyone under the age of 18 who was detained.
On Saturday, distraught families and lawyers waited outside a police station in Old Delhi where nearly dozen people were being held.
The leader of a prominent organization in the Dalit community who joined the Delhi demonstrators was arrested on Saturday, police said.
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