15.03.2024
India Implements ‘Discriminatory’ Citizenship Law
Narendra Modi’s government has implemented a controversial law on Indian citizenship that has been widely criticised as discriminating against Muslims and sparked massive protests when it was enacted four years ago. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party is seeking to increase its parliamentary majority and to secure the 73-year-old leader a third five-year term at the election, which is expected to be held in April and May 2024. The act provides a fast track to Indian citizenship for Hindus and members of five other minority religions who arrived in India before 2015 from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, India’s Muslim majority neighbours, and who experienced persecution in their home countries. The act, which also covers Sikhs, Parsees, Buddhists, Jains and Christians, extends no such rights to Muslims, many of whom were angered by legislation they saw as discriminatory. When India passed the act in December 2019, mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of people broke out in New Delhi and elsewhere in India. Dozens of people were killed in clashes during the protests. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the legislation was “fundamentally discriminatory”. India has the world’s largest Muslim minority population, numbering roughly 200mn people. Credit: Brut.
Poverty deprives people of adequate education, health care and of life's most basic necessities- safe living conditions (including clean air and clean drinking water) and an adequate food supply. The developed (industrialized) countries today account for roughly 20 percent of the world's population but control about 80 percent of the world's wealth.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
