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Vibha Sharma
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 7
Backing the Narendra Modi government on the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, BJP’s ideological fountainhead RSS on Friday said “the attempt to correct a historic wrong needed to be supported by all political parties” and also that “it should not be confused or linked” to the National Register of Citizens.
According to a top Sangh functionary, “persecuted minorities cannot be compared with the illegal immigrants in the country and those who were today opposing the legislation were opposing it only for the sake of opposition”.
The Sangh has also created a dedicated website on “everything you want to know about CAB”, which, among other issues, also has “views expressed by politicians, including from the Congress and the Left, on the issue related to granting citizenship to Hindus from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan if they faced religious persecution”.
Expressing confidence of the Bill sailing through Parliament, including the Rajya Sabha, he said, “A majority of the non-NDA parties will vote along with the government.”
“We need to come out of soft state we have become. We (BJP-RSS) are not against other minorities (Muslims). Give them a work permit in India, something that most other countries do. But to compare persecuted minorities in other countries to illegal immigrants in India is wrong,” he said on queries whether the CAB was a precursor of the NRC, another controversial move Home Minister Amit Shah plans to execute before the 2024 General Election.
However, with Shah asserting that the Centre “would implement both the NRC and the CAB determinedly”, the debate over the “two interlinked issues” is intensifying. While detractors see the two legislations as part of the larger agenda of ‘Hindu Rashtra’, the Sangh says the two issues cannot be interlinked.
The Sangh leader, who claimed two to three crore minority migrants would benefit from the move, added the CAB “was not any organisation’s or party’s issue but a national one. “All parties have favoured it at some point in time or other and those opposing it need to be exposed”.
Though the Shiv Sena has parted ways, it is expected to support the legislation and so is the JD(U), which resisted the move earlier. As far as the Rajya Sabha is concerned, the government’’s confidence flows on the basis of support from “non-UPA, non-NDA” regional parties that have helped the treasury benches through critical moments in the last Lok Sabha.
May be tabled in House tomorrow
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