The Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 changed certain provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955 which was passed five years after India became a Republic with its own Constitution.

Under the leadership of Dr B R Ambedkar: C Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhai Patel, Maneklal Munshi, Abul Kalam Azad, Vasudev Malavankar, S P Mukherjee, and Balwantrai Mehta brought the Indian Constitution alive – a draft that would make the microcosm of the world, its largest democracy.

The constitution declares India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, assuring its citizens justice, equality and liberty, and endeavours to promote fraternity.

However, on the night of 11th December, the upper house of the Parliament passed the contentious Citizenship Amendment Bill that is set to institute the provision for a blanket acceptance of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Afghan religious minorities as Indian citizens.

During the intense and lengthy debate around the bill, in both houses, Union Home Minister Amit Shah made several statements that can be deemed misleading. Nevertheless, his speech justifying the amendment garnered the support the government had hoped for and gave it the necessary numbers to push the bill to the President’s table.

The Logical Indian decided to evaluate some of his statements that raise doubts and may mislead a common person’s interpretation of the new law.

“This bill is for those lakhs and crores of people who are living their lives in hell.”

The Union Home Minister kept referring to the unsubstantiated number of ‘lakhs and crores’. This, he said was a legitimate number as his research told him that apart from the Intelligence Bureau’s (IB) number of 31,313 refugees (from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh) in India, there were more residing hiding their real ethnicity over fear of societal ostracism.

He claimed in the Parliament that these people will reveal their previous nationality as soon as the bill becomes a law, making the number of refugees rise to ‘lakhs and crores’.

Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019

It was believed by several circles of the media and society that the new act will legalise the residency of migrants who have entered India on or before 31st December 2014. Amit Shah’s claim was that the number of such migrants was in lakhs and crores.

But, the highlighted portion in the law, that is included with an ‘and’ clause makes a reference to the Passport Act of 1920.

Clause (3), of sub-section (2), of section 3, of the Passports Act, 1920

This will allow the government to exempt anyone from the conditions of the Citizenship Act, therefore may also disregard the cut off of 31st December 2014.

The intermingling of the two (Citizenship Amendment Act and Passport Act) makes a blanket provision for anyone, that the government deems worthy, to be an Indian citizen.

And, as underlined by the present dispensation, only Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis, and Christians from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are entitled to benefit from it.

So even if the current number of refugees is 31,313 – as reported by IB, it could very well swell to lakhs and crores by the way of clause (3), of sub-section (2) of section 3, of the Passports Act.

“Article 14 is not violated as there is reasonable classification”

Article 14 of the Indian Constitution is a fundamental right and it also grants every one on Indian soil – regardless of nationality – equality before the law and hence there can be no discrimination on the basis of religion.

Article 14 of the Indian Constitution

However, the Union Home Minister claimed time and again that the proposed legislation would not violate the mentioned article as it has been drafted with ‘reasonable classification’.

The reasonable classification here distinguishes select non-Muslim religious communities from India’s neighbouring Islamic countries as ‘persecuted minorities’. It excludes the Ahmadiyya sect (which is officially a religious minority in Pakistan) and atheists in Bangladesh who have a well-documented history of discrimination and social repudiation. This has raised several questions on the selective nature with which ‘persecuted minorities’ have been defined.

Also, the premise of the ‘reasonable classification’ is quite shaky. The government declared that non-Muslims in Pakistan have faced systemic persecution, but Amit Shah did not cite any source for the claim.

When India stood undivided in 1941, census data showed that the non-Muslim share in the population of the region of West and East (now Bangladesh) Pakistan was 14% (Amit Shah claimed it was 23%).

During the Partition, most non-Muslim families left their ancestral homes and fled to present-day India fearing religious persecution in 1947. Due to the mass migration that ensued on both sides, a considerable chunk of India’s Muslim population traveled to settle in the new Islamic country and a large…