LUCKNOW, India: Indian authorities stepped up security and shut down the Internet in various places on Tuesday while members of the ruling party planned marches backing a new citizenship law even though nationwide protests against it are escalating.
An interior ministry official said the government expected all state security officials to be on duty on Christmas Eve and through the holiday week.
“We want the police to prevent an outbreak of violence but we also realize that the situation can get out of control, hence paramilitary forces will be deployed in markets and public spaces,” said a senior security official in New Delhi.
At least 20 rallies in support or against the new law were scheduled in different cities with protesters from both sides canvassing on social media to get people out over Christmas and the New Year.
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) aims to fast-track citizenship for persecuted Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who arrived in India before Dec. 31, 2014, from Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Its passing on Dec. 11 triggered demonstrations in the eastern state of Assam, where protesters fear it will make illegal migrants from Bangladesh legal residents.
Elsewhere, critics say the law discriminates against Muslims and is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda. The government denies that.
Activists opposed to the law said they were trying to keep up the momentum and were looking for ways to work around the police clampdown and Internet blackouts.
Senior members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading rallies to support the law said they were determined to counter what they see as misleading criticism of it.
“We want to explain that the law is not anti-Muslim and we want to expose that those who are leading the protests against the law are misleading innocent, uneducated Muslims,” said BJP spokesman Gopal Krishna Agarwal.
At least 21 people have been killed since the law was passed in protests that represent the first major opposition to Modi’s legislative agenda since his party’s landslide re-election this year.
Police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), which has seen the most deaths in the protests, suggested that Islamists were stirring up the anti-CAA demonstrations.
“We have proof that an Islamic group with its headquarters in Delhi and its strongest base in the southern state in Kerala is behind the violence in the UP,” said senior police officer Kalanidhi Naithani.
In the last 10 days, police in UP have taken nearly 900 people into custody for violence, said an official in the state’s police control room. More than 2,000 people have been arrested across India.
New York-based Human Rights Watch criticized the police action and called on them to stop using unnecessary lethal force against demonstrators.
The rights group said police had only used excessive force only against those protesting against the law, including many students.
“The authorities should prosecute violent protesters, but they also need to hold police officers to account for using excessive force,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the group’s South Asia director.
In Uttar Pradesh’s capital of Lucknow, Tabassum Raza, a 26-year-old Muslim woman, said she was beaten by police who stormed into her home.
“After barging into my house, one of the policemen immediately pointed a gun at my forehead and asked me to tell where were the men were hiding,” she said.
“When I told them there was no one in they started beating me with batons and damaged everything,” Raza said, showing bruised forearms and legs.
Vikash Chandra Tripathi, superintendent of police in West Lucknow, said the allegations were baseless and police were only searching for people involved in the violence.
He said the police would investigate if an official complaint is lodged.
“So far the police have not received any complaints from anyone regarding,” he said.
India beefs up security amid outrage against citizenship law, anger with police
https://arab.news/bcwd6
India beefs up security amid outrage against citizenship law, anger with police
- ‘We want the police to prevent an outbreak of violence but we also realize that the situation can get out of control’
- Activists opposed to the citizenship law said they were trying to keep up the momentum
Russia slams Western peacekeeping plan for Ukraine
- “The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Zakharova
- She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive“
MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday slammed a plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine as “dangerous” and dubbed Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war,” dousing hopes the plan could be a step toward ending the almost four-year-war.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing the warring sides to strike a deal to halt the conflict, running shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a bid to get an agreement across the line.
An initial 28-point plan which largely adhered to Moscow’s demands was criticized by Kyiv and Europe, and now Russia has slammed the attempts to beef-up protections for Ukraine should an elusive deal be reached.
Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week, including a peacekeeping force.
But in its first comments since the summit, Moscow said the statements were far away from anything the Kremlin could accept to end its assault.
“The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive.”
The remarks come as Russian strikes plunged hundreds of thousands in Ukraine into darkness, leaving families without heat in below-freezing temperatures — attacks that Zelensky said showed Russia was still set on war.
- ‘Legitimate military targets’ -
European leaders and US envoys announced earlier this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed when the fighting stops.
But Moscow has repeatedly warned that it would not accept any NATO members sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Zakharova said Thursday, repeating a threat previously uttered by Putin.
Zelensky also said Thursday that a bilateral agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalization at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.
Kyiv says legally-binding assurances that its allies would come to its defense are essential to convince Russia not to re-attack if a ceasefire is reached.
But specific details on the guarantees, the European force, and how it would engage have not been made public.
Zelensky said earlier this week he was yet to receive an “unequivocal” answer of what they would do if Russia does attack again after a deal.
Zelensky has also said that the most difficult questions in any settlement — territorial control of the eastern Donbas region and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — were still unresolved.
- Russian strikes cut heating -
Ukraine was meanwhile scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households after a new barrage targeted energy facilities in its Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipropetrovsk’s capital Dnipro, said on Telegram.
He announced power was “gradually returning to the hospitals” after the blackouts forced them to run on generators. The city authorities also extended school holidays for children.
About 600,000 households in the region remained cut off from power in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said.
In a post on social media, Zelensky said the attacks “clearly don’t indicate that Moscow is reconsidering its priorities.”
In addition to the unrelenting pummelling of Dnipropetrovsk, Russia pressed on with its ground assault on the region, claiming to have taken another village there.
It is not one of the five Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
