NEW DELHI, DEC 19: Police detained hundreds of people in New Delhi and southern city of Bengaluru on Thursday and shut down the internet in some places as protests entered a second week over a new citizenship law that critics say undermines India’s secular constitution.
Citing law and order concerns following violent protests against the law during the past week, authorities imposed bans against public gatherings in parts of the capital and two big states - Uttar Pradesh in the north and Karnataka in the south.
Defying the bans, protesters held rallies at Delhi’s historic Red Fort and a town hall in Bengaluru, Karnataka’s state capital, but police swept in to round up people in the vanguard of those demonstrations as they tried to get underway
Amid citizenship law outcry, Indian authorities ban protest
In Bengaluru, Ramchandra Guha, a respected historian and intellectual, was taken away by police along with several other professors, according to an aide.
“I am protesting non-violently, but look they are stopping us,” said Guha before being surrounded by police.
Police said they had detained around 200 people in the city, where according to protest organizers thousands of people attended four protests held in the city on Thursday.
At the Red Fort protest, academic turned politician Yogendra Yadav as among some 100 that police said they had detained.
“We are here to peacefully demonstrate against this law,” Mohammed Maz, a bearded middle-aged protester told Reuters as he was led away by police.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dug his heels in over the law that lays out a path for people from minority religions in neighboring Muslim countries - Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan - who had settled in India before 2015 to obtain Indian citizenship.
Opponents of the law say the exclusion of Muslims betrays a deep-seated bias against the community, which makes up 14% of India’s population, and that the law is the latest move in a series by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to marginalize them.
