Kolkata: Amidst the West Bengal government’s opposition to Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), state Cabinet minister Shashi Panja said that it won’t be implemented in Bengal.
Panja told the media that CAA and anything relating to citizenship will not work in West Bengal. “The CAA is related to the NRC, that is why we are opposing it. We don’t want detention camps like those in Assam,” she told the reporters. “They do not have solutions to the problems that are plaguing the country and hence are coming up with these discriminatory laws,” she added.
The TMC chairperson Mamata Banerjee earlier criticised the exclusion of Muslims from the ambit of the CAA, asserting that it aims at creating division among the people of the country. She had alleged that this was just a poll gimmick by the BJP and warned that if anyone fills up the forms they will declare themselves as illegal. On Thursday, reacting to Union Home minister Amit Shah’s allegation that the Bengal government has failed to stop infiltration at the state’s borders, TMC TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said: “Amit Shah has given same-side goal. Borders are protected by the Border Security Force which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs whose minister is Amit Shah. It is Shah who is responsible for ensuring no infiltration takes place. It is the duty of the Central government.” He added: “The entire mechanism of protecting borders comes under Shah’s Home Ministry and yet he is claiming that infiltration is taking place. Whose failure is that then? Instead of stopping infiltration your ministry is implementing laws that divide people on the basis of religion.
This is dangerous”.
Further, he said: “We are saying that those citizens whose names are in the voter list, ones who have Aadhaar cards, are already citizens
of the country.”