The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear pleas seeking a stay of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 on March 19. Upon the matter being mentioned by senior advocate Kapil Sibal, Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said that the matter will be listed next week.
A clutch of over two hundred petitions, filed in the top court since 2019, have challenged various CAA provisions which aim at granting fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who came to India because of religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014. The law has been questioned on grounds of religious discrimination against Muslims and arbitrariness. While the CAA was passed by the Parliament in December 2019, the Union government issued the rules for it on Monday, March 11.
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. Source: HT