Two days after Home Minister Amit Shah’s Lajpat Nagar rally on Sunday, two women who held up a banner against the Citizenship Amendment Act during the rally were evicted from their rented home.
According to Indian Express, one of the woman also claimed that their protest had led to a mob trying to barge inside their residence. One of the women, Surya Rajappan, told the Indian Express that, "When we became aware of Shah’s pro-CAA rally, we exercised our constitutional and democratic right to protest. As a common citizen, this was the perfect opportunity for me to register my dissent in front of the Home Minister. I believe that if I had failed to do so, I would have failed my own conscience.”
She further added that after she and her flatmate displayed a banner from their balcony, just as the rally led by Shah was passing through the lane, members of the rally started getting enraged and visibly agitated, and proceeded to harass and intimidate them by shouting threats and derogatory/misogynistic remarks. The banner read: Shame; CAA and NRC, crossed out; Jai Hind; Aazadi and #NotInMyName.
"A mob of around 150 collected on the street below our apartment. The protest banner was torn and taken away. A group forced their way up the stairs which lead to our residence and threatened to break down the door if we did not let them in. Not anticipating such a strong and violent reaction, we feared for our lives and safety and locked ourselves into our home, while they kept violently banging at our door and shouting until the police intervened,” she told the Indian Express.
That is when their landlord informed that they had been evicted from the residence. Later after sometime a police along with the woman's father entered the house and recorded statements. Police registered a complaint against the mob. The landlord told the leading daily that the incident caused inconvenience to everyone. He also added that he shouldn't have made them his tenants in the first place.
BJP president Amit Shah on Sunday led the party's door-to-door 10-day campaign to spread awareness about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act with top party leaders reaching out to people across the country, amid a wave of protests against the contentious law since it was passed in December. Shah visited homes in Lajpat Nagar and talked to people about the benefits of the amended citizenship law. He also distributed literature on the subject and urged them to go through it.
During his visits to several houses in an area with a significant population of refugees who had arrived in India after Partition, he was seen urging people to take out their mobile phones to give a missed call to a toll-free number the BJP has launched for the masses to register their support to the law.
