NEW DELHI: The rules under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will be notified to implement it before the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, said Union Home Minister Amit Shah at a televised event on Saturday. Describing it as an “act of the country”, Shah said it is not to take away anyone’s citizenship but to grant the same. “The CAA is an act of the country… It will be notified before the polls. There should be no confusion around it,” he said.The home minister said the CAA was a promise of the Congress government. “When the country was divided and the minorities were persecuted in those countries, Congress had assured the refugees that they were welcome in India and they will be provided with Indian citizenship. Now they are backtracking,” he said, alleging that minorities in the country, especially the Muslim community, are being provoked.“The CAA cannot snatch away anyone’s citizenship, there is no such provision in the Act. It is an act to provide citizenship to refugees who were persecuted in Bangladesh and Pakistan,” Shah said.The assurance of implementing the CAA, which was passed in Parliament on December 11, 2019, has been one of the major electoral planks of the BJP during the Lok Sabha elections.The CAA, introduced by the Narendra Modi government, is aimed at confering Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants, including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians, who migrated from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan and arrived in India before December 31, 2014. Following the passage of CAA by Parliament in December 2019, significant protests erupted in the country.
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