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Main India Opposition Party to Stage Protest Against New Law

Associated Press

   NEW DELHI - India's main opposition party will stage a silent protest
   in the capital on Monday against a contentious new citizenship law, a
   day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi defended the legislation at a
   rally in New Delhi and accused the opposition of pushing the country
   into a ``fear psychosis.''

   The protest, led by Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, 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 Modi's government to marginalize the country's 200 million
   Muslims.

   The party's former president, Rahul Gandhi, urged young people in New
   Delhi to join the protest at Raj Ghat, a memorial dedicated to Mahatma
   Gandhi.

   "It's not good enough just to feel Indian. At times like these it's
   critical to show that you're Indian & won't allow to be destroyed by
   hatred,'' Gandhi tweeted.

   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.

   Authorities have so far taken a hard-line approach to quell the
   protests. They've evoked a British colonial-era law banning public
   gatherings, and internet access has been blocked at times in some
   states. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has asked
   broadcasters across the country to refrain from using content that
   could inflame further violence.

   The communication shutdown has mostly affected New Delhi, the eastern
   state of West Bengal, the northern city of Aligarh and the entire
   northeastern state of Assam.

   Undeterred, protesters have continued to rally throughout the country.

   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.

   Protests against the law come amid an ongoing crackdown in
   Muslim-majority Kashmir, the restive Himalayan region stripped of its
   semi-autonomous status and demoted from a state into a federal
   territory in August.

   The demonstrations also follow a contentious process in Assam meant to
   weed out foreigners living in the country illegally. Nearly 2 million
   people, about half Hindu and half Muslim, were excluded from an
   official list of citizens - called the National Register of Citizens,
   or NRC - and have been asked to prove their citizenship or else be
   considered foreign.

   India is building a detention center for some of the tens of thousands
   of people who the courts are expected to ultimately determine have
   entered illegally. Modi's interior minister, Amit Shah, has pledged to
   roll out the process nationwide.

   On Sunday, Modi denied the existence of a detention center, accusing
   the Congress party of spreading fear that Indian Muslims would be
   jailed there. He also contradicted Shah, saying that there had been no
   discussion yet of whether to execute a nationwide citizens registry.

   The protests against the law began in Assam, the center of a
   decades-old movement against migrants, before spreading to
   predominantly Muslim universities and then nationwide.