Over two hundred petitions, filed in the top court since 2019, have challenged various provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Act.
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear pleas seeking a stay of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 on March 19. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal mentioned the issue before Chief Justice DY Chandrachud who said that the matter will be listed next week.
A clutch of over two hundred connected petitions, filed in the top court since 2019, have challenged various CAA provisions. The law aims to fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim refugees, who came to India because of religious persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014.
While the CAA was passed by the Parliament in December 2019, the Union government issued the rules for it on Monday.
The notification of the Act triggered criticism from Opposition leaders, who claimed that the notified rules were “unconstitutional”, “discriminatory” and violative of the “secular principle of citizenship” enshrined in the Constitution.
Critics of the CAA also argued that by excluding Muslims from its purview and linking citizenship to religious identity, the law undermines the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
The Centre, however, has maintained that the CAA is about granting citizenship and that no citizen of the country will lose citizenship.
In an interview with news agency ANI on Thursday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah asserted that CAA will never be taken back and the BJP-led government will never compromise with it.
“This is our sovereign right to ensure Indian citizenship in our country, we will never compromise on it and CAA will never be taken back,” the senior BJP leader said in an interview with ANI. “The opposition has no other work. They have a history of saying one thing and doing another. However, the history of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP is different. What BJP or PM Modi says is like carved in stone. Every guarantee made by Modi is fulfilled.”
