CAA rules: Opposition slams Centre but wary of polarisation ahead of Lok Sabha elections

Nearly five years after Parliament enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, the Centre, on Monday (March 11), notified rules for the implementation of the controversial law. The Act, which allows persecuted Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis and Jains – but not Muslims – citizens of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who had taken refuge in India before December 31, 2014 to seek Indian citizenship, was passed by Parliament in December 2019.

The notification, issued despite the constitutional validity of the 2019 Act pending adjudication by the Supreme Court, has been slammed by the Opposition as yet another communally divisive tactic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the schedule of which is expected to be announced later this month.

Smells BJP’s ploy

Though the implementation of CAA 2019, on its own, does not impact in any way the citizenship of existing Indian Muslims, the Opposition smells a BJP ploy in using the controversial law to “provoke an agitated response” from the country’s largest religious minority and “polarise the electorate” before the Lok Sabha polls.

This fear of the Opposition stems from that fact that the CAA was one of the three rallying points – the other two being the equally contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) – over which many among Indian’s Muslim citizenry and civil rights groups had launched a non-violent agitation against the Centre, particularly at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, between December 2019 and March 2020.

Opposition parties have also pointed at the “coincidence” of the Centre notifying the rules for the Act on a day when the BJP was facing a blistering attack from its rivals after the Supreme Court turned down the State Bank of India’s request for extending till June 30 the deadline of revealing donor and beneficiary details of the scrapped Electoral Bonds scheme. The Amit Shah-helmed Ministry of Home Affairs, which framed the rules for the Act, has claimed that the long delay in the notification was due to the COVID pandemic; a justification that has no takers in the Opposition.

Questions timing

“The timing of the notification is highly suspect. The CAA was enacted in December 2019 and the whole world saw the protests with which it was met. If the government was so committed to this law, why did it wait all these years to notify it; why just weeks before the Lok Sabha polls... they are obviously doing this now to divert attention from their many failures on issues of unemployment, price rise, corruption; they only want to polarise the election on Hindu-Muslim issues,” Congress general secretary (organisation), KC Venugopal, told reporters.

Mohammed Jawed, Congress MP from Bihar’s Kishanganj constituency, accused the Centre of “leaving no stone unturned to tear the syncretic fabric of India with such unconstitutional and communally divisive laws”. Jawed, whose parliamentary constituency has one of the highest Muslim populations in the country and is infamous for its economic backwardness, told The Federal he has “no problem with the government giving citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Parsis from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan” but questioned “why, if you say this law is a humanitarian imperative, do you want to exclude only persecuted Muslims.”

Similar condemnations have come in from nearly all Opposition parties even as the BJP lined up a litany of its leaders to “congratulate” the Prime Minister on “yet another historic milestone”. Bengal chief minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee too questioned why the government hadn’t notified the rules earlier. “You should have notified rules six months ago. If there are any good things, we always support and appreciate but if anything is done that is not good for the country, TMC will always raise its voice and oppose it. I know why today's date was chosen (for the notification) before Ramazan (sic). I appeal to the people to be calm and avoid any rumours,” Banerjee said.

Rivals on same page

The issue has also brought Banerjee and her rivals from the Left Front on the same page. In a post on X, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury dubbed the notification as a panic reaction to “divert attention” from the Modi government following Monday’s order by the Supreme Court to the SBI in the Electoral Bonds matter.

Several Opposition leaders The Federal spoke to expressed cautious optimism over the public seeing through the Modi government’s “diversionary tactics” and “headline management”. There was also, however, a palpable fear that “any hasty backlash from political, social or religious leaders of the Muslim community” hand the BJP “a chance to polarise the Lok Sabha election”.

“It is the responsibility of Opposition parties as well as leaders of the Muslim community to explain to the Muslim electorate that the CAA rules alone, though blatantly unconstitutional and unfair, will not have any adverse impact on the lives of Indian Muslims because they are meant only to grant citizenship to refugees and have no bearing on the citizenship of already existing Muslims of India. The CAA is under challenge in the Supreme Court and we have to all wait for the court’s verdict... it is only if the CAA is combined with the NPR and the NRC that it may have any adverse impact for existing Muslim citizens; if that happens, the Opposition will naturally do everything in its power to stall it but until such a thing really happens, we have to maintain calm and not do anything that the BJP can exploit electorally,” a Congress leader, who is also a Supreme Court advocate, told The Federal.

A leader from the Samajwadi Party echoed similar views and added, “the Opposition has to be particularly careful in states that have substantial Muslim population and where CAA-NRC has already been a very emotive issue for the minorities... in parts of Assam, Delhi, Bengal; dominant Opposition parties will have to work with influential Muslim organisations to ensure nothing untoward happens... the elections are weeks away and our sole aim should be to use the power of our vote to teach the BJP a lesson... if there is no reaction from the Muslim community, then this CAA issue will become a non-issue in the election but if there is a violent or even a non-violent but visible push back as had happened in Shaheen Bagh, Modi will turn this into a Pulwama-like pitch electorally”.