NEW DELHI/BENGALURU – Three people died of injuries sustained in intensifying protests against a new citizenship law in India on Thursday with thousands taking to the streets nationwide in defiance of temporary bans on public gatherings.
Some protesters clashed with police over the law, passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, that critics say is discriminatory against Muslims and undermines India’s secular constitution.
Police detained hundreds of people in the capital Delhi and the southern city of Bengaluru and shut down the internet in some districts to help pre-empt large planned protests.
College students, academics, minority Muslim groups and opposition parties have been prominent in an escalating series of street protests now in their second week.
The government says the Citizenship Amendment Act is required to help non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who came to India before 2015 by granting them Indian nationality.
Two of Thursday’s deaths occurred in the southern city of Mangaluru and one in Lucknow in northern India, according to hospital officials. Two of the dead protesters – one in Mangaluru and one in Lucknow – had been shot, they said.
A curfew was imposed later in parts of Mangaluru.
Internet and text messaging services were suspended by government order for four hours in parts of Delhi, mobile carriers said, widening a communications clampdown in restive areas stretching from disputed Kashmir to the northeast.
In the financial capital Mumbai, more than 5 000 protesters gathered on Thursday evening, forcing the police to impose traffic restrictions.
Haroon Patel, an Indian citizen who lives in London, joined the Mumbai rally and called the new law the first step towards dictatorship, adding: “We have to save the country.”
Supporters of the bill held a counter-demonstration in Gujarat, Modi’s home state in western India.
“The fault lines are defined – either one supports the law or stands against (it)…Indians have to decide and protest,” said Rupak Doshi, who organised a large rally in support of the law in Gujarat’s main city Ahmedabad.
Most protests across the country came off peacefully, but some turned violent, including in Mangaluru where stone-pelting mobs ignoring a temporary ban on public gatherings were repelled by police, a government official said.
A Reuters witness said police fired shots in the air in at least three areas and unleashed tear gas to scatter protesters.
In Lucknow, three protesters were hospitalised with gunshot wounds and one later died, an official at King George Medical University said.
Angry mobs in Lucknow set fire to dozens of motorcycles and cars, four media broadcast vans and three buses, police said. (Reuters)