Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Sunday said the resolutions against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed by several State Assemblies recently, were a “political statement” through which they had conveyed their apprehensions about the Centre’s intent behind linking nationality with religion. “The States want the Union government to know of their unhappiness,” he said.
Interacting with journalists at the Jaipur Literature Festival here, Mr. Tharoor said the Centre should listen to the views of the States, as it would need their cooperation if it wanted to move forward from the CAA for preparing the National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citizens (NRC).
“What will the Centre do if the States refuse to make their employees available for enumeration? The idea of mentioning dubious citizenship against names in the proposed NRC is purely the BJP’s creation... It is rightly being opposed,” Mr. Tharoor, a former Union Minister, said.
The Thiruvananthapuram MP asserted that Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s victory would be completed if the CAA led to NPR and NRC in which large sections of population would be deprived of their rights if they failed to prove their citizenship. “A choice between Jinnah’s idea of the nation and Mahatma Gandhi’s idea is still available to us. The BJP is justifying Jinnah's logic through CAA.”
Mr. Tharoor said the enactment of CAA and the BJP’s intention to bring in the NPR and the NRC amounted to fulfilment of Jinnah’s two-nation theory with which the Lahore resolution was passed in 1940.
