Home Minister Amit Shah has attacked Congress leader P Chidambaram for his statement that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA) and the three new criminal laws will be revoked if Congress comes to office.
Shah called it as a brazen act of appeasement and said that the former finance minister’s party has lost nerve after seeing the first phase of voting.
“Neither Congress will ever come to office nor the five laws enacted for public welfare will ever be revoked,” Shah said.
Accusing Congress of appeasement, Shah said the opposition party is jittery after the trend of first phase of voting made it plain that it is headed for a crushing defeat.
A promise to repeal CAA, enacted to provide citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis who fled to India to escape religious persecution in the Muslim countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, is not part of the Congress manifesto.
However, Chidambaram, who is also the head of Congress’s manifesto committee, made the commitment while talking to media in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) on Sunday.
Though it has been seen as a rethink prompted by CPM’s attacks on Congress and Rahul Gandhi for their silence on CAA, Chidamabram claimed that the promise to junk CAA was supposed to be part of the manifesto but could not make it to the final draft because of “space constraint”.
Shah was scathing in his response.
“This law (CAA) represents the fundamental principles of the Constitution. P Chidambaram is insulting the dreams of the architects of the country’s independence who advocated for these laws by talking about scrapping them. CAA is the nation’s law, and it ensures that no one can stop citizenship from being granted to the brothers and sisters of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Sikh and Parsi communities who have suffered religious persecution and come to India,” the home minister said.
He further said Congress is hell-bent on harming Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Sikh, and Parsi communities to appease its vote bank.
“It is a ‘Modi Guarantee’ that each individual from persecuted minority communities who have come to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh will receive citizenship through the CAA, and no one can stop it,” he added.
Saying that Congress is staring at a heavy defeat, the home minister said, “That is why they are working on their appeasement policy again.
