India braces for more protests as anger grows against new religion-based citizenship law

Tensions remained high across India on Monday (Dec 16) after five days of protests against a contentious new religion-based citizenship law turned violent in the capital New Delhi, with police using tear gas to disperse crowds.

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Anger against the law has fuelled protests across Asia's third-largest economy, from Assam, about 1,900km to the east of Delhi, to Bengaluru and the financial capital Mumbai.

The agitation in Assam prompted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was scheduled to visit the state, to delay a three-day trip that was set to begin on Sunday.

The United Nations has described the law as "fundamentally discriminatory".

The authorities shut down Internet access in some districts in Assam - which borders Bangladesh - and in West Bengal as protesters defied police to take to the streets against the Citizenship Amendment Law.

Passed last Wednesday, it bars undocumented Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan from seeking citizenship but allows undocumented Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from these regions to do so.

Home Minister Amit Shah, who introduced the Bill in Parliament last week, called for calm on Sunday, saying cultures in the north-eastern states were not under threat, News18 television network reported him as saying.

Still, political leaders in the states of Kerala, Punjab and West Bengal all said publicly that they will not implement the law, setting up a potential conflict with the federal government in New Delhi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government has vowed to implement a citizenship drive nationwide to weed out undocumented migrants. Assam was the first state to implement the register. The arduous process that ended in August has put about 1.9 million people at risk of becoming stateless. The new citizenship law has further raised concerns about the whittling away of values laid out in the secular Constitution of the world's second-most populous nation.

As protests raged in Delhi late on Sunday, student leaders and demonstrators called for police restraint and for the new law - which they say goes against India's secular Constitution - to be overturned.

"We don't want an India where our citizenship is decided on the basis of our religion," said N. Sai Balaji, national president of All India Students' Association at the demonstration outside Delhi police headquarters. "We want an India where humanity will be the basis of our citizenship. This is Delhi. Imagine what's happening in the remote corners of this country."