CAA will be implemented after Covid vaccine drive is over: Amit Shah to Bengal BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari
On Tuesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah told Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal assembly, that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) will be implemented once once the Covid vaccination drive is over.
Shah said this during his meeting with Adhikari in Parliament House on Tuesday, to take up the matters related to the functioning of BJP in West Bengal.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was passed by the Parliament of India on December 11, 2019.
It amended the Citizenship Act, 1955 by providing a pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians, and arrived in India before the end of December 2014.
The law does not grant such eligibility to Muslims from these Muslim-majority countries.
The act was the first time that religion had been overtly used as a criterion for citizenship under Indian law and attracted global criticism.
After the meeting, Adhikari said on Twitter that the Home Minister has conveyed to him that the Central Government would go ahead with the long-delayed implementation of the CAA, once the third dose of Covid vaccination is completed.
The government launched the ‘precautionary dose’ vaccination drive in April and it is expected to be completed by the year’s end.
The meeting came amidst the backdrop of swift political developments in the Trinamool Congress-ruled West Bengal.
Following a massive recruitment scam in the state the ED conducted raids and recovered crores in cash and kind. TMC leader Partha Chatterjee, who was then a minister in the state government, was accused of corruption and arrested.
Following the raids, the Mamata Banerjee government was forced to remove Chatterjee from her cabinet and is set to induct new faces. The BJP, meanwhile, sharpened its attacks on the state government. West Bengal BJP chief and MP Sukanta Majumdar was also planning to call on Home Minister Shah.
