Florida Senate - 2020 (NP) SR 1928
By Senator Farmer
34-04071-20 20201928__
1 Senate Resolution
2 A resolution reaffirming Florida as a welcoming state,
3 expressing the Senate’s solidarity with Florida’s
4 South Asian community, regardless of religion and
5 caste, and opposing India’s National Register of
6 Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act.
7
8 WHEREAS, the Senate supports democratic rights for all
9 peoples, and opposes discrimination based on religion,
10 ethnicity, and nationality, and
11 WHEREAS, the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
12 government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been
13 criticized for promoting violence against religious minorities,
14 silencing dissent, and actions that earned the prime minister
15 the nickname “the Butcher of Gujarat,” a reference to the 2002
16 massacre that occurred while Prime Minister Modi was chief
17 minister of the state of Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000
18 people were killed in anti-Muslim violence and many Muslim women
19 were targeted for rape and other forms of sexual violence, and
20 WHEREAS, on December 11, 2019, the Indian parliament passed
21 the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the BJP government
22 claims will help refugees fleeing religious persecution from
23 neighboring countries, but which in actuality blatantly
24 discriminates, allowing the National Register of Citizens (NRC)
25 to be updated for citizenship based on religion, favoring Hindu,
26 Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants, while excluding
27 Muslim people, and
28 WHEREAS, the CAA is the first instance of religion being
29 used as a criterion for Indian citizenship, and
30 WHEREAS, in August 2019, Prime Minister Modi’s government
31 published an updated NRC, requiring nearly 2 million people in
32 the northeastern state of Assam to document their Indian
33 citizenship or face detention at mass prison and detention camps
34 that the Indian government has begun to build and fill, and
35 WHEREAS, most Indians lack documentation, such as birth
36 certificates, to prove citizenship, and a nationwide expansion
37 of the NRC could strip hundreds of millions of people, a
38 disproportionate number of whom are Muslims, oppressed castes,
39 women, members of the indigenous and LGBT communities, of their
40 citizenship rights with no option to be renaturalized, and
41 WHEREAS, the New York Times reported on December 22, 2019,
42 that the Indian home minister, Amit Shah, had vowed in speeches
43 to expand the checks used in Assam to other states and to then
44 use the citizenship law to purge India of “infiltrators” and
45 “termites,” and
46 WHEREAS, protests in India against the CAA and the NRC in
47 December 2019 faced repression, with reports that, in the state
48 of Uttar Pradesh, police fatally fired live ammunition at
49 demonstrators and arrested thousands, and, in cities such as
50 Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr, Aligarh,
51 Sambhal, Firozabad, and Rampur, police smashed Muslim homes, and
52 WHEREAS, on January 8, 2020, people across India
53 demonstrated against the policies of the Modi government, with
54 protests against the CAA and NRC held in conjunction with a 1
55 day strike called by 10 trade unions opposing privatization and
56 neoliberalism and with strikes and demonstrations in rural
57 communities against the oppression and exploitation of farmers,
58 showing that a united movement of working people has the
59 potential power to resist and defeat authoritarianism, and
60 WHEREAS, this general strike in India was the largest
61 strike in the history of the world, with an estimated 250
62 million workers, farmers, and rural laborers stopping work and
63 joining protests against poverty, exploitation, discrimination,
64 and authoritarianism, and
65 WHEREAS, the Indian American Muslim Council, API Chaya,
66 Tasveer, Seattle South Asians Building Accountability and
67 Healing, the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle, and thousands of
68 activists and organizers have spoken out in this state against
69 the CAA and the NRC, and
70 WHEREAS, the Senate believes that the CAA and the NRC are
71 inconsistent with Florida’s position as a welcoming state for
72 people of all castes and religions from South Asian communities,
73 NOW, THEREFORE,
74
75 Be It Resolved by the Senate of the State of Florida:
76
77 That Florida’s position as a welcoming state for people of
78 all castes and religions from South Asian communities is
79 reaffirmed, as is this state’s solidarity with members of its
80 South Asian community.
81 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Senate opposes India’s
82 National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act
83 and finds these policies to be discriminatory to Muslims,
84 oppressed castes, women, and indigenous and LGBT people and
85 urges the United States Congress to support legislation
86 censuring the Republic of India for adopting these policies and
87 to call for the Parliament of India to uphold the Indian
88 Constitution by repealing the Citizenship Amendment Act,
89 stopping the National Register of Citizens, and taking steps
90 toward helping refugees by ratifying various United Nations
91 treaties on refugees.