The chutzpah of the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in approaching the Supreme Court of India to be made amicus curiae (third party) in a case challenging the validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is astounding, to say the least. When CAA has been duly passed by both Houses of Parliament in the world’s largest democracy and the matter is in court, the UN body’s intervention could have been laughed away as overreach but for an obviously malevolent attempt to besmirch India’s reputation by the office of Michelle Bachelet, the former President of Chile who is now the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Two things stand out in this move: first, OHCHR’s complete blindness to the rampant violation of human rights by India’s immediate neighbours, namely Pakistan and Bangladesh—violations because of which the minority population in these two countries have decreased drastically, unlike in India where various minority communities have been thriving, as obvious from their burgeoning numbers; and second, the abysmal ignorance of the UN body, for it comes across as uneducated in its inability to read and understand a law which is all about expediting the citizenship of minorities fleeing from persecution in the three Muslim majority countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and is not about taking away the citizenship of Indian Muslims.
