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'Be Cool Not a Fool': Viral Videos Support Citizenship Law and Urge People to Get Facts Straight

© AFP 2023 / BIJU BOROPolice personnel fire tear gas to disperse the students protesting against the government's Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), during a demonstration in Guwahati on December 11, 2019
Police personnel fire tear gas to disperse the students protesting against the government's Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), during a demonstration in Guwahati on December 11, 2019 - Sputnik International
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New Delhi (Sputnik): While the all of India is gripped with protests over the amended Citizenship law that grants citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants, supporters of the legislation have come up with videos aiming to inform citizens that vocally oppose the legislation.

As demonstrations against the anti-citizenship law show no signs of abating, a string of videos urging people not to burn their own country, in which they live, while protesting has gone viral on social media.

The videos show youngsters telling the people about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) and taking the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) narrative forward. The campaign is being shared with the hashtags #coolBano (Be cool) #FoolNahi (Not fool), along with #ChillBro #Sabtheekhai.

In a video, shared by India’s Federal Minister of Railways and Commerce Piyush Goyal, a girl talks about her male friend, and how he has been copying and sharing tweets without being fully informed about their topics.  

“The NRC has formed no law, and the CAA has nothing to do with any India citizen, be they Hindu or Muslim,” said the girl jocularly in the video.

Another federal minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, shared the video captioning it: “If you are Indian then why scared, if scared then how come you’re Indian”.

The video offers a take on people vandalising public property in anger against the country they are fighting for citizenship of.

“First read the documents. It is clearly written in it that from CAA and NRC no Indian will be affected. Then why all this mess,” said the girl acting in the video.

The girl further states, “Bro, if you’re Indian then why scared, if scared then how come you’re Indian”.

Other videos along similar lines take down protesters of the Citizenship law with sarcasm.

The videos are being widely shared by supporters of the government and BJP functionaries across social media to take on opponents of the law.

Protests over NRC and CAA have spread across the country like wildfire, as opponents of the law believe it is discriminatory and violates the Indian Constitution. Twenty-five people have reportedly died across the country up till now, in violent protests and clashes with security forces.

The federal government, however, denied the charges that the law is anti-Muslim and insists Indian Muslims need not worry.

The Citizenship Law seeks to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants from six religious minorities – Hindus, Parsis, Jains, Christians, Buddhists, and Sikhs, from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan if they arrived in India prior to 2015. It, however, does not extend the same privileges to Muslims.

The National Register of Citizens is meant to identify illegal immigrants so that they can be deported from the country.  A similar exercise in the north-eastern state of Assam identified over 1.9 million illegal immigrants, who face an uncertain fate.

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