Congress Party protest against Modi government

Описание: (23 Dec 2019) The top leadership of India's main opposition Congress party staged a protest on Monday against a new citizenship law which critics have called discriminatory towards Muslims.  
Party president Sonia Gandhi was accompanied by her son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi, and former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for a sit down protest in the Indian capital, New Delhi.
They took turns reading out the preamble to the Indian Constitution that calls India a secular and democratic nation.
The protest comes at a time when tens and thousands of demonstrators have taken to India's streets to call for the revocation of the law, which critics say is the latest effort by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to marginalise the country’s 200 million Muslims.
Twenty-three people have been killed nationwide since the citizenship law was passed in Parliament earlier this month in protests that represent the first major roadblock for Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda since his party’s landslide reelection last spring.
Most of the deaths have occurred in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 20% of the state’s 200 million people are Muslim.
The new law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It does not apply to Muslims.

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