CAA resurrected in time for polls

Electoral intent is writ large on the government’s decision to notify the rules for implementation of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, which has been frozen for over four years.

The CAA aims to provide citizenship to Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who have fled persecution from Muslim-majority countries in India’s neighbourhood -- Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh -- and arrived in India before 2015.

The government has notified the rules a few days before the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha elections would come into force. It is likely that the notification is specially targeted at states like West Bengal, which has a large Muslim population and is considered a battleground state. There is no satisfactory answer to the question why the rules were not notified for over four years and why it has been done just ahead of elections. 

The law has been controversial from the beginning and has been criticised as wrongly conceived, unconstitutional, discriminatory and unfair. It attracted widespread protests in many parts of the country, including Assam and Delhi, when it was enacted. There was violence during the protests, which subsided only when the Covid pandemic spread. It should be noted that the protests were strong in Assam, where it was feared that the law would confer citizenship to lakhs of Bangladeshi migrants. The Act has been challenged in the Supreme Court. The government has framed the rules when the court is yet to take a view of it. The rules are also certain to be challenged. The government has claimed that it has delivered on yet another commitment it had made. But the opposition parties have criticised the government’s decision as they see in it yet another polarising tactic on the government’s part to divide the voters on communal lines. 

The concerns about the Act have centred around the exclusion of persecuted Muslims from its provision and fears that it would be used to disenfranchise many Muslims in India in combination with a proposed pan-India National Register of Citizens (NRC), which had been talked about in aggressive and polarising tones by representatives of the government and the BJP around the time the CAA was enacted. While talk of such an NRC has not been heard in recent months, the problem with the CAA itself is not that it allows grant of citizenship to people escaping persecution in neighbouring countries but that it does so in a discriminatory manner, making religion a criterion for grant of citizenship. This is against the idea of citizenship envisioned in the Constitution. Now it is being put to use in the election, perhaps also with the intention to build on it in the future.