Union home minister Amit Shah on Saturday said that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will be notified and implemented before the upcoming Lok Sabha election.
Union home minister Amit Shah on Saturday said that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will be notified and implemented before the upcoming Lok Sabha election. The act was passed by the Parliament in December 2019.
“CAA is an Act of the country, it will be definitely be notified…It will be notified before the polls…There should be no confusion around it,” Shah said while speaking at the ET Now-Global Business summit in Delhi.
“CAA was a promise of the Congress government. When the country was divided and the minorities were persecuted in those countries, Congress had assured the refugees that they were welcome in India and they will be provided with Indian citizenship. Now they are backtracking,” Shah said.
He said in categorical terms that CAA was brought in to provide citizenship and not to take away anyone’s citizenship.
“Minorities in our country, and specially our Muslim community, are being provoked. CAA cannot snatch away anyone’s citizenship because there is no provision in the Act. CAA is an act to provide citizenship to refugees who were persecuted in Bangladesh and Pakistan.”
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The CAA, introduced by the Narendra Modi government, aims to confer Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants, including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and Christians, who migrated from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and arrived in India before December 31, 2014.
Following the passage of the CAA by Parliament in December 2019 and its subsequent presidential assent, significant protests erupted in various parts of the country.
CAA protests
Initially, protests began in Assam on December 4, 2019, after the CAA was introduced in Parliament. The demonstrations intensified across the country after the passage of the Act on December 11, 2019, with some areas witnessing violence. The protesters called CAA “discriminatory” and an “attack on the secularism of India”. According to reports, several people lost their lives either during the protests or due to police action, while thousands of demonstrators were held.
