The former IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan has said that the main opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was that it was discriminatory in nature and was based on religion, which should not be allowed in a country like India.
Addressing presspersons here on Thursday, Mr. Gopinathan said it was evident from CAA that it was aimed at targeting a particular community that too on a cooked-up rationale.
Mr. Gopinathan questioned the rationale behind including just Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh only, while leaving out religiously persecuted people from Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
“They have selected only six communities in these countries but there are other minority communities there. Also, they say these countries were selected because of Partition. Afghanistan was never a part of India during Partition. Whatever cooked-up rationale they are narrating is based on hatred and I don’t think we should allow a law based on hatred in this country,” he said.
“NRC is a document-based exercise to prove who is a citizen and who is not. It is not Hindu or Muslim. It is going to affect everyone. And, it is going to affect all who don’t have documents. It is the poor, Dalits, adivasis, women and all landless labour who will be affected. We have the example of Assam. It went on for six years. As many as 52,000 employees worked for it and a lot of money was spent. And, ultimately 19 lakh people were left out from the list and a majority of them were Hindus. Muslims were fewer in number. The common factor was that most of them were poor. Among them even genuine people were left out, including President’s medal winners who fought for the country in Kargil,” he said.
Referring to the government’s defence that CAA would not affect any Indian Muslim, Mr. Gopinathan said that when the issue of giving citizenship arose, it would be based on NRC and NRC was a document-based exercise. “Once the exercise begins, there will be two categories. One who is with documents and is an Indian and the other who is not having documents, a non-Indian. If you are Hindu, then you can come through CAA, and your citizenship issue will be considered. But if you are a Muslim, then, CAA will block your citizenship,” he said.
On why only Muslims were being seen in large numbers during the anti-CAA protest, he said that it was because they know that they were being targeted. But, apart from them, people from all walks of life were protesting against CAA, he said.
Mr. Gopinathan said that the CAA and NRC exercise was an unthoughtful one, like demonetisation, which had pushed the country backwards, and CAA was anti-poor.
