Chandigarh, January 17: A resolution against the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was moved in the Punjab Assembly on the last day of the two day special session on Friday.
The resolution, which was introduced by Local bodies and Parliamentary affairs minister Braham Mohindra, called for doing away with CAA as it was “against humanistic values and against secular values”. The debate on the resolution was on till last reports came in.
Speaking during the debate, Finance Minister Manpreet Badal said that people of Punjab “don’t accept injustice”. The CAA will create divisions among people of Punjab, he said.
“Punjab has a long tradition of rejecting any discrimination based on communal ideas,” he added.
Punjab is the second state after Kerala to move a resolution against the contentious CAA in the state assembly.
Badal said: “Punjab paid the price for Partition with ten lakh lives. So the land of Punjab knows what such kind of acts do to humanity.”
Badal questioned why the people of Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Muslims had been kept out under this act.
“The CAA has been passed to isolate only one community,” he added.
Once CAA is implemented, India would be the first country in the world where people of the country will have to prove their citizenship, he said.
“We Punjabis want to tell the country to learn something from our experience, the price we Punjabis have paid due to such communal acts,” he said.
If this act is implemented in the country, it will be an insult to the sacrifice of Shaheed Bhagat Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai and many “unknown martyrs”.
Supporting the resolution, Technical Education Minister Charanjit Singh Channi said this is first act which has made religion basis of citizenship.
“This act is reflection of arrival of Fascism and Nazism,” he added
The resolution being debated in the Punjab assembly stated that CAA enacted by Parliament has caused “countrywide anguish and social unrest with widespread protests all over the country”.
The resolution also lamented that the CAA seeks to negate the very secular fabric on which the Constitution of India is based. “It is divisive and stands for everything opposed to a free and fair democracy which must enshrine equality for all. Alongside the religion-based discrimination in granting citizenship, it is apprehended that the CAA is also likely to endanger the linguistic and cultural identity of some sections of our people. CAA also envisages cancellation of the registration of Overseas Citizens of India (OC) card holders, if they violate any law,’’ the resolution stated.
It stated that “the CAA is aimed at distinguishing illegal migrants on the basis of religion, which is not permissible under the Constitution. It is also violative of Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees the Right to Equality and equal protection of the laws to all persons.”
The resolution said the ideology behind the CAA is inherently discriminatory and is as far away as it can be from being a humanitarian measure, said the resolution.
“In the backdrop of these facts, it is evident that the CAA violates the secular identity of India, which is the basic feature of our Constitution; therefore the House resolves to urge upon the Government of India to repeal the CAA to avoid any discrimination on the basis of religion in granting citizenship and to ensure equality before law for all religious groups in India.
Given the apprehensions about National Register of Citizens (NRC) and that the National Population Register (NPR) is a prelude to the NRC designed to. Depriving section of persons from citizenship of India and implement CAA, this House further resolves that Central Government should amend the forms documentation associated with the NPR to allay such apprehension in the minds of the people and only thereafter undertake work of enumeration under NPR.”
