The Trinamool Congress will oppose the National Register of Citizens if the Union government tries to carry out the exercise in the state after the implementation of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Monday.
“No NRC, we just cannot accept NRC,” Banerjee said on a press conference hours after the Union government implemented the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act. Parliament had passed the law in December 2019 but its rules had not been notified.
“And if people are sent to detention camps in name of CAA, we will stop that ploy too…Remember this is a sensitive matter for Bengal and the North East. We do not want any unrest before the [Lok Sabha] elections,” she said.
At her press conference, Banerjee also questioned the timing of notifying the rules of the Act. She said that the Bharatiya Janata Party was trying to woo its supporters ahead of Lok Sabha elections.
The CAA aims to provide citizenship to undocumented migrants from six minority religious communities, except Muslims, from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the condition that they have lived in India for six years and had entered the country by December 31, 2014. The law has been widely criticised for excluding Muslims, sparking massive protests across India. The protests were driven by the fear that the law could be used, along with the nationwide National Register of Citizens, to render Indian Muslims stateless.
