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Reaffirming Saint Paul as a welcoming city, expressing solidarity with Saint Paul’s South Asian community regardless of religion and caste by rejecting the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Islamophobic ideology, and opposing India’s National Registry of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act.
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WHEREAS, the Saint Paul City Council supports democratic universal human rights for all peoples, and opposes discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion; and
WHEREAS, the City of Saint Paul has adopted a number of resolutions expressing solidarity with all members of our community, including most recently Resolution 20-621, “Condemning xenophobia and racism against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the City of Saint Paul”; which was unanimously approved on 4/8/2020 April 8, 2020; and
WHEREAS, the nation of India was founded as a secular republic in which members of all nationalities, ethnicities, races, and religious faiths are welcome, and India and the US share a common bond through democracy, the rule of law and the protection of human rights and liberty; and
WHEREAS, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is dominated by the exclusionary ideology of the Rahstriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (National Volunteers Association), which advocates creation of a militant Hindu state, and implicitly and explicitly promotes discrimination against Muslims; and
WHEREAS, on December 11, 2019, the Indian parliament under the leadership of the BJP government and Prime Minister Modi passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the BJP government claims to will help refugees fleeing religious persecution from neighboring countries, but which in fact is designed to discriminates against Muslims favoring Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants, while by excluding millions of Muslims who have come to India to flee wars in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and other Muslim countrie...
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