The Citizenship Amendment Bill that seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan without proper documents is still in the draft stage and yet to be cleared by the Union Cabinet.
The Bill also seeks to introduce a provision to “empower the Central government to cancel the registration of Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card in case of any violation.”
The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 is one of the 27 Bills mentioned in the list of business to be transacted in the winter session of Parliament that commenced on Monday. Recently the Union Home Ministry cancelled the OCI registration of author Aatish Taseer for “concealment of material facts” and “false representation” when he applied for his original Person of Indian Origin (PIO) status in 2000, by not revealing that his biological father, former Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province Salman Taseer, had British and Pakistani citizenship. Mr. Taseer has denied the allegations and said that his parents were never married and that is why his father’s name was not even on his birth certificate.
The Bill introduced in the last session of the Lok Sabha lapsed after it could not be cleared in the Rajya Sabha.
“The Bill is still in the drafting stage, once it is ready it will be presented before the Union Cabinet. Only after the Cabinet has cleared the Bill, will it be introduced in Parliament,” said a senior government official.
Till Monday, the Bill was not on the agenda of the Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
On July 1, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said in the Rajya Sabha that the government will bring a Bill in Parliament to provide citizenship to “Hindu refugees” left out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam.
The SC-monitored final NRC in Assam was published on August 31 and it excluded 19 lakh out of 3.29 crore applicants in the State. If the Bill is passed, all the Hindus excluded from NRC will get Indian citizenship, though those excluded will not be immediately declared ‘illegal immigrant’ and could approach the Foreigners Tribunals and then the higher courts.
Former Home Minister Rajnath Singh, while introducing the Bill in Lok Sabha on January 8, had said that the six communities — Hindus, Jains, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan faced “discrimination and religious persecution” and they “have no place to go to, except India”.
The Bill seeks to grant Indian citizenship to the six communities who came to India till December 2014. It also reduces the mandatory requirement of 12 years stay in India to seven years to be eligible for citizenship if they do not possess any valid document.
