The Centre has expanded the ambit of the rules under the Citizenship Amendment Act, simplifying the paperwork required for persecuted minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan to seek Indian citizenship.
The Citizenship Amendment Act provides a fast-track to Indian citizenship for 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 have entered the country by December 31, 2014.
The home ministry has issued a clarification about Schedule-IA of the Citizenship Amendment Rules, which has a list of nine documents through which applicants can prove that they were citizens of Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan. The clarification was communicated to the Directorate of Census through a letter on July 8.
With the clarification, applicants can now provide any document issued by the state or the central government, or any judicial or quasi-judicial authority in India proving that they or their ancestors had been citizens of the three neighbouring countries.
The home ministry said it had been “receiving numerous queries requesting to clarify as to what type of documents may be accepted from the applicants against Sr. No. 8 of the Schedule IA of the Citizenship Rules, 2024”.
The eighth entry in Schedule IA of the Citizenship Amendment Rules says that applicants can cite documents showing that their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents are or had been citizens of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh.
The rules notified under the law on March 11 had also empowered local priests or a “locally reputed community institution” to issue the mandatory certificates certifying the faith of an applicant.
The notification of the law’s rules came despite the Act being widely criticised for discriminating against Muslims. The law had sparked massive protests across the country in 2019 and 2020.
Indian Muslims fear that the law could be used, along with the nationwide National Register of Citizens, to harass and disenfranchise them. The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to identify undocumented immigrants.
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