Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday said the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which was passed by the Parliament in December 2019, will be notified and implemented before the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
The Home Minister further accused the Congress of backtracking on its promise to implement the CAA. “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,” Shah said at the ET NOW Global Summit 2024.
The CAA, Shah stressed, was brought in to provide citizenship and not “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 said.
Introduced by the Modi government in 2019, the CAA 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.
Meanwhile, speaking about the upcoming polls, Shah said he was confident the Narendra Modi government will return to power, with the BJP getting 370 seats and the NDA more than 400.
Shah asserted that there is no suspense over the outcome of the Lok Sabha polls and even the Congress and other opposition parties have realised that they will again have to sit in the opposition benches.
“We have abrogated Article 370 (of the Constitution, which gave a special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir). So we believe that the people of the country will bless the BJP with 370 seats and the NDA with over 400 seats,” Shah said at the ET NOW Global Business Summit 2024.
(With PTI and ANI inputs)
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.