Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens of India

CAA is not a problem. It will pass the test of constitutionality under the doctrine of intelligible differentia. It does not discriminate against any Indian citizen. Though one can argue that include more countries, more religions, more of anything. Those are the policy issues. I'm not delving into that. Personally, I am against such generosity of granting citizenship to anybody who enters the territory of India either for economic reasons or in fear of persecution, given our already stressed economy. India does and should respect the Refugee law. Giving shelter is different from giving citizenship. Other prospering nations should also come forward to help these immigrants. These nations together can put international pressure on the defying country to stop persecuting its citizens and take them back.

Coming to NRC, in its current form, it will only fuel the existing communal tensions and, there will be chaos everywhere. What is the objective of NRC? Identification of genuine citizens and detection of illegal immigrants. So the purpose here is not granting citizenship. I understand that such exercise may be necessary, but do you think that the implementation of NRC in the whole of India would solve this? Will it not be another blunder like demonetization? In Assam itself, 19,06,657 persons were excluded, and the remedy that they have is to approach a Foreigners' Tribunal with an appeal against non-inclusion if they so desire. We already do not have enough judicial infrastructure to tackle pending litigation, but NRC would require more foreigner tribunals, more detention camps, and more staff. Is India prepared for such tedious exercise? Answer is clearly no.

NRC has many bugs and loopholes. It is not illogical to apprehend wrongful non-inclusion in the NRC. Here CAA becomes discriminatory. It will protect you if you are a non-Muslim. All of us can prove that we came to India before 31st December 2014, and if one happens to be a non-Muslim, he/she can benefit from CAA. Even that is problematic. You are declaring your citizen a foreigner and then taking him back under CAA. Well, at least they have a safeguard. But what about Muslims? Where do they go? To detention centres? Had there been no CAA, everyone would go to those centres.

We acquired citizenship by virtue of Articles 5, 6 and 8 of the Constitution. Our citizenship is protected under Article 10 of the Constitution. Sections 3 to 7 of the Citizenship Act of 1955 lay down how citizenship of India can be acquired and sections 8 to 10 lay down how citizenship can be lost. NRC cannot take it away. Article 11 empowers the Parliament to legislate on citizenship but, such legislation cannot arbitrarily take away citizenship acquired under Articles 5, 6 and 8 in view of Article 10.

NRC suffers from many defects. In NRC with CAA, only Muslims suffer, in NRC without CAA, everybody suffers.

How is government going to protect native Muslims against possible exclusion from the NRC list? Until these concerns over the implementation of NRC are addressed, I cannot support it.