New Delhi, Jan 03 (PTI) With a government functionary stating that rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, will be notified “much before” the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress on Wednesday said it is now clear that the legislation was always meant as a “weapon to polarise” voters just before the polls.
Jairam Ramesh, the Congress general secretary, said in a post on X that the Narendra Modi government “bulldozed” the contentious law in Parliament in December 2019.
Rules to make the law operational should have been in place, according to Parliamentary procedures, within six months but nine extensions were sought and given, Ramesh said.
“Now we are informed that the rules will be notified before the Lok Sabha elections. So it is clear that it was always meant as a weapon to polarise the voters just before elections,” the Congress leader said.
Earlier, Congress MP Manish Tewari said religion cannot be the basis of citizenship in a country that has secularism enshrined in the Preamble of its Constitution.
Under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act brought in by the Modi government, Indian nationality will be granted to persecuted non-Muslim migrants — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians — who had entered India till December 31, 2014, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
There were massive protests in some parts of the country after the legislation was passed by Parliament in December 2019 and subsequently received presidential assent.
A senior government functionary on Tuesday said the Rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 will be notified “much before” the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections.
Tagging a media report on the remarks by the government functionary, Tewari said in a post on X, “In a country that has secularism enshrined in the Preamble of its Constitution, can religion be the basis of citizenship, whether extra-territorial or even territorial? The answer is no.”
“This was the nub of my argument when I led the opposition to the CAA bill in the Lok Sabha in December 2019. It is the core question in the challenge before the Supreme Court,” the MP from Punjab said.
“Hypothetically — tomorrow a government could argue that religion will be the basis of citizenship even territorially not place of birth or the other criterion for citizenship in the Constitution of India or the Citizenship Act,” he said.
In the name of reasonable classification to surmount religious persecution in India’s neighbourhood, Tewari said he hopes the ground is not being prepared for some other “insidious template”.
