Across the world, the Indian diaspora is lending its support to protests in India against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by organising rallies in the countries they are living in.
On Friday, around 300 students and academicians from various universities in the Netherlands, including the University of Leiden, University of Groningen, and Erasmus University, protested at The Hague against the CAA and the NRC by peacefully assembling in front of the Indian embassy.
One of the organisers was Amrita Shivaprasad from Bengaluru. “We will reconvene after the New Year, in various parts of Netherlands. We want to keep the momentum alive till the case comes up in the Supreme Court,” she said.
On Friday, they began the protest by reading the preamble and chanted anti-CAA slogans in Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, and Gujarati.
“As The Hague is also the seat of the International Court of Justice, we wanted our voice of dissent to be heard loud and clear,” said Ms. Shivaprasad.
At the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., Indian students are organising a series of protests. “On December 16, we protested in front of the consulate general of India. On Friday, we held a protest at the University of Edinburgh,” said Darshan Dhruvanarayana, a Bengaluru resident who is studying in Edinburgh.
They are planning to organise a panel discussion in the university after the Christmas break. “It is freezing cold here, but we will continue our protest against the assault on the pluralism of our country,” he said, and added that the very identity of India was “unity without uniformity and diversity without fragmentation”.
Shathabish Shivanna, an LLM student at Edinburgh who took part in the protest, complained of repeated assaults on the diversity of India. “We cannot tolerate more. Enough is enough. Law will take its own course but we have to do our bit as well,” he said.
