By Lipakshi Seedhar :
Since the day CAA and NRC were declared, a lot of protests have gone around in all
the parts of the country. People have come out on roads and did silent protests, burnt
buses, harmed a lot of people, etc to make their voices reach the Centre Government.
During the media coverage of all the protests, it was also seen that a lot of people when asked about what is CAA and NRC didn’t even know the full forms for these
abbreviations. There is a section of people supporting it, while, there’s another section
opposing it and there’s a third section which is still trying to understand, what is CAA and NRC.
CAA stands for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. An amendment of the Citizenship act of 1955, it was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019. The Citizenship Act of 1955 and its later amendments prohibited illegal migrants from obtaining Indian citizenship. It defined illegal immigrants as citizens of other countries who entered India without valid documents, or who remained in the country beyond the period permitted by their travel documents. The 1955 law provided provisions to deport or jail illegal immigrants. The CAA, however, amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 by providing a path to Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian religious minorities fleeing persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, the countries being Muslim majority. The CAA is the first act where religion is a criterion for citizenship under Indian law though.
NRC or the National Register of Citizens is an official record of those who are legal
Indian citizens. It includes demographic information about all those people who qualify as citizens of India as per the Citizenship Act, 1955. So far, this database has only been maintained for the state of Assam but as of a parliamentary session held on 20 November 2019, Home Minister Amit Shah declared that the register would be
extended to the entire country.
The implementation of NRC would mean that the illegal immigrants in India will be targeted but Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jains and Parsis coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where these religions are minorities, won’t be affected, if they claim that they arrived in India after fleeing religious persecution. This means if a nationwide NRC comes in as proposed, any illegal immigrant from nations other than Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, will be affected. Amit Shah also quoted, “Whoever is not eligible to be included in the NRC will be sent out of the country.” He also said that bonafide Indian citizens should have no fear.
A lot of people are opposing this act as they feel that the Muslims of the country will now be deprived of Indian citizenship and be deemed illegal immigrants if they are unable to give adequate proof of citizenship as Bhartiya Janta Party is a Hindu favoring party.
Amit Shah in an interview has stated that “Whenever the NRC will come, no person of the minority community will face injustice but no infiltrators will be spared”. Shah said. Even Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “NRC hasn’t been finalized yet. There is no question of joining CAA with NRC as the draft is yet to be completed.”
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