New Delhi: Home Minister Amit Shah hurriedly got the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by Parliament last week to cover up and legitimise two gazette notifications surreptitiously brought by the Modi government on September 8, 2015 to achieve the same purpose.
Hurry because both the notifications are under challenge before the Supreme Court and the petitions may be pressed in the Court opening after the vacation up to January 1. Hurry because legal lacuna was pointed out by the law ministry while drafting replies to the petitions challenging the two notification.
The government has powers to issue and amend the rules concerning a law passed by Parliament. The related notifications are also placed in Parliament but nobody from the Opposition objected to the changes so made in the rules.
Quoting the two notifications, the Home Ministry had rather issued the directives as early as in 2015 to the district authorities to give the citizenship to the refugees and in fact many of them have already acquired the Indian citizenship that will be just legitimise on the strength of the amended Citizenship Act.
The changes were effected through executive orders in the gazette relating to the passport and foreigners acts to allow the non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh to stay in India if they had entered India with valid papers prior to December 31, 2014, no matter that those papers have lapsed.
The first gazette notification amends the Passport (Entry into India) Rules to allow the non-Muslims to stay in India if they were seeking shelter due to religious persecution or feared such an action and had entered India before December 31, 2014 with valid documents or papers which were then valid but had lapsed.
The Minorities were specifically defined as Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians.
The Foreigners (Amendment) Order of 2015 says the Foreigners Act, 1946, would not apply to these persecuted categories to prevent their harassment and deportation.
The opposition parties did not make any noise about the two notifications that achieved the same purpose which Shah now wants to achieve through the amended Citizenship Act. They were rather challenged in the Supreme Court by the parties from Assam and Tripura on the ground that regularising the stay of such refugees hurts the interests of the local population.
