"Persecuted minorities are happy": Annamalai questions Tamil Nadu CM Stalin's authority to prevent CAA implementation
Mar 12, 2024
Chennai (Tamil Nadu) [India], March 12 : After Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin announced that his government would not implement the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in the state, BJP TN President Annamalai questioned the authority of the CM to prevent the act to come into force.
The BJP Chief, while addressing a press conference here, claimed that persecuted minorities are happy with the implementation of the CAA.
"In these three countries any religious persecuted minorities have come in so they will be granted citizenship by following a process... This amendment is not going to take a citizen from anybody, in fact, people are going to gain their citizenship. In what world Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is living? So what authority does he have to say that I am going to prevent this from happening, he cannot prevent it, how can he prevent it?" Annamalai said.
He further said that the statement made by MK Stalin 'is going against the oath he has taken'.
"It is going against the oath he has taken, better he resigns and gives a political speech...All the religious persecuted minorities are happy yesterday they celebrated sweets, are then not our people?" he added.
Stalin on Tuesday dismissed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act as 'divisive and bereft of any use' and asserted that it will not be implemented in the state.
Hitting out at the BJP regime at the Centre for notifying the rules for implementing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 'in a haste' when the Lok Sabha polls are round the corner, Stalin said the CAA and its rules went against the basic structure of the Constitution.
"There is not going to be any use or benefits due to the CAA, which only paves the way for creating divisions among the Indian people. The stand of the government is that this law is completely unwarranted; it is one that must be repealed." Hence, "the Tamil Nadu government will not give any opportunity in any manner to implement the CAA in Tamil Nadu," he asserted in an official release.
The CAA rules, notified by the Narendra Modi government on Tuesday and passed by Parliament in 2019, aim to confer Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants - including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and Christians - who migrated from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and arrived in India before December 31, 2014.
