“Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to cover up the statements made by Union Ministers and the BJP working president on the National Register of Citizens (NRC). He hasn’t had any real change of heart,” senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram said on Monday.
“I don’t think he is stepping back. I don’t think there’s a real change of heart. I think the real change of heart will be visible when he makes a formal statement that the CAA will be kept in abeyance or suspension, and the NRC exercise is abandoned,” Mr. Chidambaram said when asked if the Prime Minister was taking a step back in the wake of protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
Mr. Chidambaram said the NRC was a flawed exercise. “When they identified originally and reduced it to 19 lakh people [in Assam], roughly half are Muslims and half are non-Muslims. Everybody will be affected by it,” he said.
The Rajya Sabha member said the BJP was lying on the NRC proposal. “Time and again, [Union] Ministers have said the NRC will be implemented. [BJP working president] Nadda said ‘we will implement the NRC, we will implement the CAB’. It’s all on record. [Home Minister] Amit Shah said in Parliament that the NRC will be implemented across the country,” he said.
On Mr. Modi’s assertion that claims of detention centres being set up in connection with the NRC were nothing but rumours spread by the Opposition, Mr. Chidambaram said there were newspaper articles about a camp being built at Nerul.
“Why is the Prime Minister denying this? All he has to do is pick up his phone, call his secretary or the director of the Intelligence Bureau, and they will give him the pictures,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram asked what the government planned to do with the 19 lakh people who had been left out of the NRC in Assam. “Are you going to imprison them, keep them in camps? How many camps will you construct? One camp in Assam that houses 3,000 people is costing ₹40 crore. If you calculate, for 20 lakh people, you will need ₹24,000 crore. Does any State government have this kind of money? If you build camps across the country, you need lakhs of crores of rupees,” he said.
He sought to know what the detention process would entail, whether the detainees would be kept in the camps for a specific period of time or until their death, the status of their children and the medical facilities that would be provided to them. “We have to understand their design. We will never allow India to become another Germany. What the Germans did to the Jews, the BJP is now planning to do to the Muslims,” he claimed.
