New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday said that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will be officially notified and enforced before the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Shah stressed that the CAA is intended to grant citizenship rather than revoke it, emphasising its purpose to bestow Indian citizenship upon persecuted non-Muslim migrants. “CAA is an Act of the country, it will be definitely notified. It will be notified before the polls. CAA will be implemented by the polls, and there should be no confusion around it,” Shah said while speaking at the ET Now-Global Business summit in the national capital.
The CAA was cleared by Parliament in December 2019.
“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. Now they are backtracking,” Shah said.
The CAA was brought in to provide and not “take away anyone’s citizenship”, he stressed.
“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 added.
Proposed by the Modi government in 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) seeks to grant Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants, such as Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and Christians, who fled from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and entered India before December 31, 2014.
Speaking on the forthcoming elections, Shah said the Modi government would return to power with more than 400 seat. “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,” he said.
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