HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, July 16: The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) today staged a state-wide protest against the state government’s directive to its Border Police wing not to refer cases of non-Muslim illegal immigrants who entered the state before 2015 to the Foreigners Tribunal and instead advise them to apply for citizenship through CAA.
In various parts of the state, the AASU activists burnt copies of the CAA and the latest directive.
Related Posts:
Demonstrations were staged in Guwahati, Dibrugarh, Golaghat, Nalbari and Udalguri, among other places on Tuesday.
“The CAA is against the Assam Accord and AASU will never accept it. So, there can be no question of accepting this directive,” an AASU leader claimed.
According to the Assam Accord, names of all foreigners coming to the state on or after March 25, 1971 would be detected and deleted from the electoral rolls and steps would be taken to deport them.
“Our demand for constitutional safeguard of identity of the Assamese people remains, and we ask the government to amend the Constitution if required to ensure it,” they added.
Senior advocate Santanu Borthakur, a petitioner in one of the suits before the Supreme Court against the CAA, said that the government’s latest directive is within legal provisions of the Act.
“However, propriety demands that the government should not have issued it since the CAA as a law has been challenged before the Supreme Court claiming it is unconstitutional,” Borthakur told PTI.
In such a scenario, both the Centre and the state should have waited for the verdict of the Supreme Court, he said.
Borthakur also pointed out that the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) for the state is yet to be notified, with about 19 lakhs of the applicants being left out of the final draft published in August 2019.
“It is common knowledge that majority of the left-out applicants are Hindu Bengalis. Now, when the NRC is notified and these people become foreigners, it will be upon the government how it will deal with them.
“The government can then grant them citizenship as per regular means, or ask them to take the CAA route,” he maintained.
Borthakur said certain provisions of the CAA, like submitting documents of origin of Bangladesh, are proving detrimental as the Hindu Bengalis here have been claiming to have entered Assam before March 25, 1971, the cut-off date for granting citizenship as per the Assam Accord.
The chief minister had stated on Monday that eight people have so far applied under CAA in the state. (With inputs from PTI)
