NEW DELHI: Leaders from prominent Muslim bodies on Friday said the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act may force extremely apprehensive Muslims to convert, reported The New Indian Express.
The one-two punch of the NRC followed by the CAB is an an attempt to eradicate the identity of 200 million or so Muslims across the country.
Top Muslim organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) along with members of the civil society said that the political parties calling themselves to be so-called ‘secular’ let the Muslims down by favoring their vote in support of the “contentious” Bill that will destroy the secular and democratic tenets of the revered Constitution.
While addressing a joint conference, Salim Engineer, vice-president, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind also responded to a question on conversion of Muslims will be likely to happen because of this poisonously divisive and dangerous law.
Mr. Salim said, “Conversion cannot be ruled out. This law has to be seen together with NRC. When a lot of genuine citizens won’t have documents to get through NRC, as we saw in Assam, everybody except Muslims will manage to escape that because of CAA. At that time, a lot of Muslims may think they too would have escaped the trauma if they were non- Muslims.”
President Ram Nath Kovind gave assent to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 on Thursday night, making it into an Act.
Before becoming a law, the CAB was passed by both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha to provide Indian nationality to Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains and Buddhists fleeing persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh with a cut-off date of December 31, 2014.