CITY OF SEATTLE
RESOLUTION __________________
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A RESOLUTION reaffirming Seattle as a welcoming city, expressing the Seattle City Council's solidarity with Seattle's South Asian community regardless of religion and caste, and opposing India's National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act.
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WHEREAS, the Seattle City Council supports democratic rights for all peoples, and opposes religious and ethnonationalist discrimination; and
WHEREAS, the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for promoting violence against religious minorities, silencing dissent, and actions which earned Prime Minister Modi the nickname "the Butcher of Gujarat," a reference to the 2002 massacre - when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat - in which an estimated 2,000 people were killed in anti-Muslim violence, and many Muslim women were targeted for rape and other forms of sexual violence; and
WHEREAS, on December 11, 2019, the Indian parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the BJP government claims will help refugees fleeing religious persecution from neighboring countries, but which blatantly discriminates, allowing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to be updated for citizenship based on religion, favoring Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants, while excluding Muslim people; and
WHEREAS, the CAA is the first instance of religion being used as a criterion for Indian citizenship; and
WHEREAS, in August 2019, Modi's right-wing government published an updated NRC, requiring nearly two million people in the northeastern state of Assam to prove with documentary evidence their Indian citizenship or face detention at mass prisons and detention camps that the Indian government has begun to build and fill; and
WHEREAS, most Indians lack documentation such as birth certificates to prove citizenship, and a nationwide expansion of the NRC could strip...
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