Union Home Minister Amit Shah on December 26 asserted firmly that no one can cause hindrance in the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Shah calls CAA as the law of the land and accuses West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of misleading people on the issue.
During a closed-door meeting with the state BJP’s social media and IT wing members at the National Library here, Mr Shah said it is the commitment of the party to implement the CAA.
Mr Shah seemed positive on the fact that the party will secure more than 35 out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from the state. In the 2019 polls, the saffron camp had managed to secure only 18 seats.
The Bengal BJP media cell shared a list of pointers from Mr Shah’s address at the closed-door programme. Later in the evening, it also made public a few video clips of Shah’s speech.
“We have been working to form a BJP government in West Bengal after the next assembly polls. An established BJP government would mean the end of infiltration, cow smuggling and providing citizenship to religiously persecuted people through CAA,” he voiced at the party programme.
Mr Shah further launched a scathing attack on Ms Banerjee for misleading the public on the issue of CAA.
“At times, she is trying to mislead the people, the refugees, whether CAA will be at all implemented in the country or not. I want to say this explicitly that CAA is the law of the land and no one can stop its implementation as it is the commitment of our party,” he said.
The TMC led by Mamata Banerjee has stood in opposition of the CAA that was passed by Parliament in 2019.
The promise of implementing the rather controversial CAA had been a major poll plank of the BJP in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. This is considered as a plausible factor by saffron party’s leaders that led to the rise of the BJP in Bengal.
The CAA looks to grant Bharatiya citizenship to persecuted minorities like Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who had entered Bharat on or before December 31, 2014.
