The passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in Parliament will mark the definitive victory of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's thinking over that of Mahatma Gandhi's, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Sunday, asserting that the exercise of granting citizenship on the basis of religion will reduce India to a "Hindutva version of Pakistan".
The former Union minister also alleged that the BJP government wants to single out "one community" and refuses to grant its members asylum from oppression on the same conditions as other communities.
In an interview to PTI, Tharoor said even if the bill is passed by both the Houses of Parliament, he is confident that no bench of the Supreme Court will allow such a "blatant violation" of the fundamental tenets of India's Constitution to go unchecked.
"It is a shameless performance by a government which as recently as last year, refused to entertain any discussion on developing a National Asylum policy, which I had proposed in a Private Members Bill and shared personally with the then home minister, his MoSes and his home secretary," Tharoor said.
Suddenly, they are going the extra mile in granting citizenship to refugees, whereas in reality, they don't even want to take the basic steps as required under international law to improve the determination of refugee status or ensure decent treatment of refugees, he alleged.
"All of this makes it abundantly clear that this is merely a cynical political exercise to further single out and disenfranchise an entire community in India and in doing so, a betrayal of all that was good and noble about our civilization. It will reduce us to a Hindutva version of Pakistan," Tharoor asserted.
Asked about the Congress' stand on the Bill, he said, "Though I am not an official spokesperson for the party, I do believe that all of us in the Congress are clear that the Citizenship Amendment Bill is not just an affront to the basic tenets of equality and religious non-discrimination that have been enshrined in Article 14 and 15 of our Constitution, but an all-out assault on the very idea of India."
The contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan if they faced religious persecution there is likely to be introduced in Lok Sabha on December 9