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Alameda County becomes 7th US body to denounce the draconian CAA-NRC that is targeting citizenship of Indian Muslims.
Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), an advocacy group dedicated to safeguarding India’s pluralist and tolerant ethos has welcomed the resolution passed by Alameda County in the state of California against the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and related initiatives such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR) that threaten to disenfranchise millions of Indian Muslims.
The Alameda County resolution refers to the fact that the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom designated India as “Country of Particular Concern ( CPC),” and that the Commission in its 2020 report, said that India was “engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, egregious religious freedom violations.”
“Furthermore, it proclaimed that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors opposes the Citizenship Amendment Act, the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizenship in India which together are discriminatory towards Muslims, caste oppressed minorities, women and indigenous people,” the resolution concluded.
Ahsan Khan, the President of Indian American Muslim Council, said, the “resolution passed by Alameda County, is consistent with the values of the American and Indian democracies. And hence, I strongly believe that such opposition of various city councils to Indian government’s exclusionary laws, should be a model for the incoming Biden administration to follow and uphold.”
This is a major setback for proponents of Hindu Nationalism in the United States, as Alameda County is one of the largest counties in Silicon Valley with a population of over 1.6 million. The county is counted as the seventh most populous county in the state and incorporates 14 cities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alameda County’s opposition to the discriminatory citizenship provisions of the Indian government, comes in the series of stands taken by various cities in the United States. Six city councils- San Francisco, Seattle, Cambridge, Albany, Saint Paul and Hamtramck- opposed the exclusionary citizenship laws and provisions of the Narendra Modi government.
IAMC is dedicated to promoting the common values of pluralism, tolerance, and respect for human rights that form the basis of the world’s two largest secular democracies – the United States and India.