Central Government may bring controversial citizenship bill

New Delhi: The Central Government may spring a surprise on the last day of the Winter Session by introducing Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 which grants citizenship for minorities of all the neighbouring countries.

Before that Chairman of Joint Parliamentary committee on this bill may present their final report on Monday.

The JPC headed by BJP MP Rajendra Agarwal adopted the report rejecting all amendments put forward by the opposition parties in the last meeting. All the opposition members from Congress, TMC, SPM and CPM MPs sought time to present their note of dissent to the JPC. On Friday, all the opposition parties had sent their note of dissent to the Chairman of the JPC.

Pradip Bhattacharya and Sushmita Dev from Congress, Derek O'Brien and Prof Sougata Roy from TMC, Jafar Ali Khan of SP and Md. Selim from CPM sent their note of dissent. All the opposition parties gave an argument in the note of dissent almost in a similar way. The basic argument was that the proposed bill will bring out the ethnic divisions in the state of Assam. Opposition fears that introduction of this bill once again resurges the extremist group such as ULFA. Many of these groups and partner of BJP, AGP and the students' Unions are opposing the bill. The security forces already blamed the outfit for the killing of five Bengali Hindu as they were perceived as beneficiaries of the bill in eastern districts of Tinsukia.

Sources of TMC says that they had incorporated in the note of dissent about the exclusion of 40 lakhs people from ongoing NRC process. They said that out of 40 lakhs 28 lakhs are Bengali Hindus, 10 lakhs Bengali Muslim and 2 lakhs Hindus from other parts of the country. During the NRC process, 25 Bengalis had committed suicide in the last six months due to citizenship harassment. But Non-Bengalis Hindus are given assurance that they would be included in the NRC.

The note of different political parties contains that they wanted amendments of Clause 2 of the bill seeking to eliminate the specific mention of six minorities community and also the names of Bangladesh. If this happened then the bill would have been in secular nature as Indian constitution does not permit to give citizenship in the name of a particular religion. But all their amendments were bulldozed as BJP under the pressure of RSS wanted to pass the bill in a hurry to polarise the society.