CAA implementation before Lok Sabha elections, says Amit Shah

CAA implementation before Lok Sabha elections, says Amit Shah

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act or CAA will be notified and implemented in the country before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Saturday. The act was passed by Parliament in 2019 but was not notified amid strong protests from several sections of the society.

The Act will come into force only after the rules are notified. Once passed, the government had six months time to notify the rules but it kept seeking extention every six months.

“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,” the home minister remarked during a business summit in Delhi.

Under the controversial CAA, Indian citizenship will be granted to non-Muslim migrants – Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians who entered India from Pakistan and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014.

Shah said the CAA was a promise of the Congress and accused the grand old party of now backtracking on it.

“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,” he said.

He further clarified that the act was brought by the Modi government to provide citizenship to non Muslim refugees 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,” he added.

Earlier last this month, Union Minister Shantanu Thakur told a gathering in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas that the CAA will be implemented across the country in seven days.

Thakur, also a BJP MP from Bangaon, said that the Ram temple inauguration has been done and now the central government will implement the CAA not just in West Bengal but across the country.