INDIAN Prime Minister Narendra Modi denied today that there was “any trace of divisiveness” in his notorious Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslim refugees from consideration for citizenship.

He denounced the opposition Congress and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) for spreading “lies and fear” about the Act, which has provoked mass protests across India, and said the demonstrators were “trying every tactic to push me out of power.” Twenty-three people have so far been killed in clashes with the police and thousands have been arrested.

The government has cut off internet access in parts of New Delhi and Uttar Pradesh and the whole state of Assam in recent days in a bid to stop protesters organising. Assam has seen the biggest protests, given the Modi government has already excluded two million of its native-born residents from citizenship using a National Register of Citizens. India is building a vast detention centre in Assam which critics say will be used to incarcerate people who lose their citizenship, though Mr Modi denied this yesterday.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory notice over the weekend telling broadcasters to refrain from using “anti-national” content.

But the CPI-M urged people to continue demonstrating peacefully against the Act, which its general secretary Sitaram Yechury has called “unconstitutional and anti-constitutional” because it undermines the secular nature of the constitution, which bans discrimination on grounds of “caste, creed or sex.”

The party also said that the mobilisation against the Act was growing, with 10 of India’s 30 chief ministers of states and union territories having said they will oppose its implementation.

“Despite all these threats and warnings, the struggle to defend the secular concept of citizenship and constitutional values is gathering strength. More and more people are realising that what the BJP-RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu chauvinist paramilitary organisation] combine are out to accomplish is nothing but the setting up of a Hindu Rashtra [polity],” the party stated in a People’s Democracy editorial.

• Pakistan said today that Indian mortar fire had killed three civilians and damaged a dozen homes in the Pakistan-ruled portion of Kashmir. India said that Pakistan had started the exchange of artillery fire.