The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, is the law of the land and no one can stop it from being implemented, Union Home Minister Amit Shah asserted on Tuesday as he accused West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of misleading citizens on the subject.
“This is our party’s commitment,” said Shah at a meeting of the West Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party’s social media and Information Technology wing members amid slogans of “Jai Siya Ram”. “It is the duty of every Indian to protect the brothers who have been persecuted and threatened with religious conversion in neighbouring countries.”
The Citizenship Amendment Act, approved by Parliament on December 11, 2019, provides citizenship to refugees from six minority religious communities except Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the condition that they have lived in India for six years and entered the country by December 31, 2014.
The Act has been widely criticised for excluding Muslims, sparking massive protests across the country. Indian Muslims fear the law could be used along with the National Register of Citizens to harass and disenfranchise them. The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to identify undocumented immigrants.
Shah on Tuesday alleged that Banerjee, a vocal critic of the citizenship law, has been misleading citizens and refugees about whether the legislation will be implemented at all in the country.
The rules of the citizenship law are yet to be published, even though parliamentary guidelines say they must be published within six months of an Act coming into force.
The Union home ministry has sought extensions at least eight times to frame the rules since the law was enacted. It had initially cited the coronavirus pandemic as the reason for the delay and subsequently said that framing the rules needed more consultation.
After the comments, Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge called Shah “the most incompetent home minister in independent India”.
“How come he has time to comment on CAA and watch his son [Jay Shah] administer cricket matches in Ahmedabad but does not want to comment on Manipur or comment on the Parliament security breach issue?” Kharge said, according to ANI.
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