“Our Prime Minister wasted his first mandate in demonetization and is wasting his second mandate in de-citizenization,” Professor M V Rajeev Gowda, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha.

Prof Gowda was speaking at the inaugural session of ‘Suvāda’ on ‘Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the idea of India’ organised by Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) Centre for Public Policy (CPP), at IIM-Bangalore.

He said that the CAA and NRC were not magnanimous as it is made it out to be as it is discriminatory and goes against the basic structure of our Constitution and the secular and plural principles on which the country was built on.

“We cannot see CAA in isolation and it has to be seen as a larger project which the current dispensation has been pursuing for a long time has been its ideological basis of giving privilege to one religion over every other, explained Gowda.

‘Suvāda’ an IIMB initiative, is a public platform where issues of public importance, significance, and relevance will be discussed as and when required to provide a neutral space for informed discussions with an aim of reducing the rhetoric.

In his reply, Swapan Dasgupta, BJP member and presidential nominee to the Rajya Sabha said that the CAA did not have the power to take away citizenship of anyone in the country, and that NRC was a fast track provision to grant citizenship to other refugees or illegal immigrants.

“Such extensive and exhaustive project needs consultation and clarity on the design and methodologies which has yet to be specified and explained,” he clarified.

“The primary beneficiaries of CAA are the Bengalis who came to India from Bangladesh during and after the 1971 war. NRC is an exercise of identifying who are and who are not citizens in the country. Such project has been and long overdue as we are by nature, largely under-documented,” he said.

Accepting that the linkage of CAA and NRC was yet to be designed, he said that the BJP had not expected such strong and sustained resistance. “However, we got to fight it in a way we were not prepared for. This is mainly because the other side is determined to object it vehemently after two successive defeats,” Dasgupta said.