The Union Ministry of Home Affairs on Monday said it will notify the rules of the Citizenship Amendment Act today. In a statement this evening, the MHA said that the new citizenship rules being notified by the government today will enable persons eligible CAA as passed in 2019 to apply for citizenship. The development comes over four years after the legislation was passed by Parliament in December 2019 and received the President’s assent in January 2020.
“Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) will be notifying today, the Rules under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA-2019). These rules, called the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024 will enable the persons eligible under CAA-2019 to apply for grant of Indian citizenship. The applications will be submitted in a completely online mode for which a web portal has been provided,” the MHA said.
The law enables the grant of citizenship to eligible migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan belonging to six minority communities. Muslims have been excluded from this list of eligible migrants, a development that led to nationwide protests in 2019 as Opposition parties demanded a rollback of the law terming it discriminatory.The implementation of the CAA was delayed on account of the impasse on the notification of rules. The CAA allows non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to seek Indian citizenship through naturalisation, provided they belong to the Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Jain, and Buddhist communities. The legislation is based on the assumption that these communities faced religious persecution in the neighbouring countries.
The new rules are expected to focus on the documents needed to prove that applicants lived in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Bangladesh before December 31, 2014, and follow one of the religions mentioned in the Act. Sources suggest that this can be achieved by providing any Indian government document where the applicant declared their religion as Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Jain, or Buddhist before December 31, 2014.
Reacting to the development, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that the Trinamool Congress will fight against any attempt by the BJP to deprive people of their rights. “Let me see the rules first. The notification has not been issued yet. If people are deprived of their rights under the rules, then we will fight against it. This is BJP’s publicity for elections, it is nothing else,” she said.Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh questioned the timing of the notification of rules and said it was designed to polarise the elections in West Bengal and Assam.
“After seeking nine extensions for the notification of the rules, the timing right before the elections is evidently designed to polarise the elections, especially in West Bengal and Assam. It also appears to be an attempt to manage the headlines after the Supreme Court’s severe strictures on the Electoral Bonds Scandal,” Ramesh said in a post on X.
Meanwhile, security has been beefed up in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, the epicenter of protests against the legislation in 2020.