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Citizenship Bill may have to wait for House nod
Why it is in news?
- The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 is unlikely to be tabled in the monsoon session of Parliament as the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) that is examining the legislation intends to have wider consultations.
- The Bill proposes citizenship to six persecuted minorities — Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists — from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who came to India before 2014.
- There has been strong resistance to the Bill in Assam as it seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh.
- Several political and civil groups in Assam have said the Bill would pave the way for giving citizenship to illegal Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh in Assam, in violation of the Assam Accord, 1985.
Issue
- The JPC that visited Assam on May 7 faced protests as indigenous groups see the Bill as a move to legitimise Hindus who have migrated from Bangladesh after 1971.
- As per the orders of the Supreme Court, the next draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is to be published on June 30, and this has also created hurdles to the passage of the Bill.
- A total of 3.29 crore people applied for inclusion in the NRC. In the first list, around 1.9 crore names were included.
- The NRC is being updated to weed out illegal migrants who came to the State after the 1971 war when Bangladesh liberated itself from Pakistan.
- The cut-off date for NRC is midnight March 24, 1971 and all those who migrated to Assam from Bangladesh before this period would get Indian citizenship as per the Assam Accord .
- Divergent views have emerged and in some areas there is support for the Bill and in some there is fierce opposition.
- A Home Ministry official said 12,100 Hindu immigrants from Pakistan were granted long-term visas since 2012.
- LTVs are precursors to citizenship based on the report given by the State governments.
- Through an executive order in 2015, the Home Ministry relaxed the provisions for persecuted religious minorities from the three neighbouring countries in respect of their entry and stay in India without proper documents or after the expiry of relevant documents.
- Since 2015, around 150 Bangladeshi Hindus were also granted LTVs.
- There has been no exact numbers of such minority refugees from these countries but officials put the figure at around two lakh Hindu and Sikh refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan living in India.
- There are 400 Pakistani Hindu refugee settlements in cities like Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner and Jaipur.
- Hindu refugees from Bangladesh mostly live in West Bengal and North East States.
The Hindu