The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Matua community leader and member of parliament Shantanu Thakur has said that his pronouncement last week that the Citizenship Amendment Act would be implemented in seven days was “a slip of the tongue,” The Telegraph has reported. The Matuas support both the BJP with another section supporting the Mamata Banerjee led TMC in Bengal. One section has demanded the implementation of the CAA for years now.
Thakur is, however, not the only Bengal BJP MP who has brought up the CAA – first introduced in 2019 to countrywide protests but since kept dormant by the Narendra Modi government – recently. Nisith Pramanik also mentioned that the law would be implemented soon.
The CAA offers an accelerated-track path to citizenship for non-Muslim religious minorities (Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, and Christians) from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, who entered India before December 31, 2014. This amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955 was passed in the midst pf nationwide protests and controversy in December 2019.
Now, Thakur has clarified that he meant that the rules for the Act would be “framed within seven days.”
The All India Matua Mahasangha chief was reportedly pulled up by the BJP high command for claiming on January 28 that the CAA would be implemented in seven days, “not only in Bengal but across the country.” Thakur was speaking in Kulpi in south Bengal then.
Clearly the BJP is caught between two rival support bases when it comes to the CAA – one which is the Rajbanshi community which is strongly opposed to it and the other which is the Matua community which wants it. Rajbanshis also present in next door Assam have been victims of being rendered citizenship-less over the past five years.
The Telegraph report quoted Thakur as having said last Saturday, February 3, that he “actually wanted to say that the process of framing the citizenship rules would be completed within a week.”
“But by a slip of the tongue, I said the CAA would be implemented within a week, I didn’t mean it,” Thakur added.
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