Ahead of CAA Hearing, Union Govt Asks Supreme Court to Dismiss Pleas Challenging Law ( The Wire )

New Delhi: The Union government on Sunday (October 30) told the Supreme Court that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) is a “benign piece of legislation”, and asked the court to dismiss pleas challenging its validity. The Ministry of Home Affairs added that the law seeks to provide a relaxation (on citizenship) to specific communities from certain countries with a cut-off date, The Hindu reported.

The MHA also defended the exclusion of certain areas of Assam and other Northeastern states from the application of the CAA, saying it has been done to “protect the ethnic/linguistic rights” of the natives and this was “not discriminatory”.

The CAA is a “focused law” that grants citizenship only to members of six specified communities who came on or before December 31, 2014 and does not affect the legal, democratic or secular rights of any Indian, the MHA said in a 150-page affidavit.

Also, the existing regime for obtaining citizenship by foreigners of any country continues to be untouched by the present law, the MHA said ahead of the hearing of petitions on the contentious CAA that had sparked protests in various parts of the country in late 2019 and early 2020 over alleged discriminatory provisions.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit and Justices S. Ravindra Bhat and Bela M. Trivedi is scheduled to hear as many as 232 petitions, mostly PILs, on October 31 on the issue of CAA.

The MHA affidavit said that the law is “narrowly tailored” and only those migrants “belonging to the six specified communities from the three countries who had entered into India on or before December 31, 2014 will be covered by the provisions of this Amendment Act”.

“These migrants are already living in India. The Amendment Act does not have any provision which provides for the grant of citizenship to such migrants who would have come after December 31, till date or on any future date. It is respectfully submitted that the CAA, 2019 does not in any way encourage illegal migration into Assam,” it said.

The MHA said parliament is competent to make laws for the whole or any part of the territory of India as provided in Article 245 (1) of the Constitution and the issues of policy domain cannot be challenged in a court of law.

“It is further submitted that this is a focused law that has a specific cut-off date of December 31, 2014. Therefore, only such migrants belonging to the six specified communities from the three countries who had entered into India on or before December 31, 2014 will be covered by the provisions of this Amendment Act,” it said.