CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT 2019 AND NRC – AN ANALYSIS OF THEIR LEGALITY
By Akash Agarwal
| Abstract The Citizenship Amendment Bill became a big debate since its introduction on 19th July 2016 in the Parliament. In 2019, the bill was passed despite numerous protests throughout the country. The CAA dealt with providing citizenship to illegal immigrants from specific religious groups – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians – from three countries – Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, who came to India on or before 31st December 2014. One specific community was left out from the group – Muslims. The bill grants citizenship opportunity to refugees from specific religions and regions while leaving out a major religion and other important regions, thereby causing many humans residing within Indian territory to be displaced and left stateless when implemented with the NRC. This paper analyses CAA in light of India’s international obligations as well its constitutional provisions. First chapter of the paper highlights India’s international obligation. Second chapter provides an insight to the source of minority-majority situation existing in India and to the prevailing immigration and internal displacement situation in India since independence. Third chapter presents the evolution of the citizenship laws in India since its independence and the origin of NRC. The fourth and final chapter critically analyses CAA 2019 and Assam NRC procedure in light of all previous chapters, constitutional provisions, international obligations and presents its legal repercussions in India and on the international community upon implementation. It also highlights the contradiction of CAA 2019 and ‘person of Indian origin’ definition of Citizenship Act 1955. |
| Keywords CAA, NRC, discrimination, Muslims, refugees, immigration. |
| Type | Research Paper |
| Information | Lex Humanitariae: Journal for a Change, Volume II issue IV, Pages 615-630 |
| ISSN | 2582-5216 |
| Creative Commons | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |
| Copyright | © 2021- Lex Humanitariae: Journal for a Change |