‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan - we didn’t know what we were doing,’ Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting. In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Read the full article in The Conversation.Ĭraig Whitlock, Washington Post, 9 December 2019Ī confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. It sets up a hierarchy of rights based on religious affiliation and fundamentally alters the secular basis of India’s citizenship regime. The current act is a sharp departure from that position and validates the two-nations theory.
It was a deliberate rejection of the two-nations theory: the idea that the population inhabiting undivided India contained two distinct nations, one Hindu and one Muslim, deserving two separate homelands. In fact, neither the word religion nor the names of religious groups are mentioned in the act.ĭespite the religiously-charged political context of post-partition years, India’s founding fathers adopted a secular and inclusive constitutional framework. The 1955 law makes no reference to religion or religious affiliation as a basis for citizenship. The original legislation offers essentially two grounds for citizenship: Indian origin (based on birth and descent) and long and continuous residence in India. The new act amends the Citizenship Act of India (1955). By extension, the act makes it easier for the government to terrorize, imprison and deport Muslim migrants. Muslim migrants will now have a harder time acquiring Indian citizenship. The act targets and further marginalizes India’s beleaguered Muslim minority by intentionally omitting Muslim migrants who have lived in India for decades and their India-born descendants from its scope. It infringes on Articles 14 and 15, which guarantee equality before the law and non-discrimination on religious grounds. The new law makes religious affiliation one of the grounds for citizenship, violating the basic structure of the Indian constitution. Signed into law after rushed debates in the parliament, the act is a stark regression of the trajectory of India as a mature constitutional democracy. India’s recently passed Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 is a frontal assault on the idea of India as a secular, pluralist democracy.įor the first time, legal sanction has been given to the recasting of India as a Hindu majoritarian nation where minorities, especially Muslims, are second-class citizens. India’s new citizenship act legalizes a Hindu nationĪnil Varughese, The Conversation, 18 December 2019
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