MANKIND : PRISON CAMPS PRISMS

NOT so long ago, the world used to be a place where indiscriminate detention would have attracted the attention of human rights groups.
Before the protests and the protesters, there was the construction of camps.

Even as India has erupted into rebellion over the proposed National Register of Citizens [NRC] and  a citizenship bill that would fast track citizenship for refugees from all neighboring countries save Muslims, it has been building 'prison camps'. The one in Goalpara, in Assam began being constructed last September.

Reported to be as large as seven football fields, with planned barracks for prisoners and the security forces that will guard them, this particular camp is supposed to be in operation at the beginning of the year.

The detainees are going to be the Indian Muslims who have been rendered stateless in Assam by the implementation of the NRC in that Indian state. Two million Indian Muslims belong to this category.

The camp at Goalpara is supposed to be the only one of 10 planned centres of its kind. Like the others, it will hold entire families, including children, who despite having been born in India will not be considered the citizens of this country.

Assam is not the only Indian state in which such camps are being planned.

According to the former chief minister of Maharashtra, Davendra Fadnavis, the union ministry has sent a proposal to build another such camp in Maharashtra.

The intent seems to be that once the NRC is implemented beyond Assam, the ''non-citizens'' who are unable to prove their Indian citizenship can be housed in this camp.

The construction of the camps suggests that the Modi administration has been planning a mass excision of Indian Muslims from the national citizenship list. What to do with these 'unqualified'  people?

The Modi administration's response seems to be quite simple - to hold them in detention camps. With such a dark and inhumane future ahead, it is unsurprising that Indians, Muslims and others, have turned to the streets to protest a draconian Modi administration's intent on transforming India into pre-war Germany, enabling the genocide and exclusion of Indian Muslims using any means possible.

India has a neighbour enacting just as horrendous inhumanities on Muslims. The reports of the vast camps housing thousands of Uighur Muslims have been emerging for years. With each new one, the situation appears to be deteriorating.

A recent report published by The New York Times [and based on leak documents] found that party officials wanting to cover up the existence of the camps went so far as to arrest students returning home during college breaks.

The students themselves were bewildered to find that parents, grandparents, friends had all been rounded up and taken to one of the camps. The crackdown extends not only to Uighurs but also Kazakhs and other Muslims.

The sadness of this research publishing, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Professor Rafia Zakaria, teaching constitution law and  political philosophy.