The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the Central government on five fresh pleas challenging the constitutional validity of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 on various grounds including that the “specific exclusion” of Muslims was against the right to equality and secularism under the Constitution.
The CAA, which was notified on January 10, grants Indian citizenship to non-Muslim minorities — Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian — who migrated to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh till December 31, 2014, following persecution over their faith.
The top court, on December 18 last year, had decided to examine the constitutional validity of the CAA while refusing to stay its operation. A Bench comprising Chief Justice SA Bobde and Justices AS Bopanna and Hrishiksh Roy, in the proceedings held through video-conferencing, issued the notice on the pleas filed by Tamil Nadu Thoweed Jamath, Shalim, All Assam Law Students Union, Muslim Students Federation (Assam) and Sachin Yadav and ordered their tagging with the earlier batch of PILs filed on the issue.
Indian Union Muslim League is the lead petitioner in the case. Tamil Nadu Thoweed Jamath, in its PIL, said it was raising a “seminal important questions related to the promulgation of CAA, wherein first time religion is introduced as a reference point/condition for acquisition of Indian Citizenship for illegal/undocumented migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.”
Citizenship is being extended to certain a class of migrants belonging to religion of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians and such classification violates Article 14 (right to equality) and 21 (right to equality) of the Constitution.
“Moreover, the classification based on the religious identity of the individual offends the fundamental principle of ‘Secularism’, which is enshrined as basic structure of the Constitution,” it said, adding that the benefit was specifically denied to “Muslims by specific exclusion”. Other fresh PILs also raised similar objections to the CAA.
Prior to this, Centre on March 17 had filed its response to the over 100 PILs against the CAA and had asserted that the law does not violate any fundamental right or affect the legal, democratic and secular rights of any Indian citizens.