ITANAGAR, Dec 16: The Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) has demanded that the state’s Lok Sabha members, Kiren Rijiju (who is also the union MoS for minority affairs) and Tapir Gao publicly apologize and resign “for betraying and cheating the people and the state by voting in favour of the citizenship amendment bill.”
In a press release, APCC general secretary Mina Toko on Monday accused the two of “failing to uphold the public mandate and to protect the interests of the state.”
The APCC said the two MPs failed to keep the commitment they had made during the general election to protect the interests of the state’s people.
“If today the people of Arunachal are voiceless, living in constant fear and insecure of protecting their own homeland, (it) is due to the passage made for political coercion by Rijiju and Gao in the state,” it said.
The Congress accused the MPs of “murdering our rights and protection in the constitution, secular democracy, peace and harmony,” and added that “they have rejected the very existence of our indigenous culture, language and identity.”
Stating that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) would “regularize the refugees (Chakma, Hajong, Tibetans) automatically who are settling in Arunachal by surpassing the inner line permit (ILP) system,” the APCC said the two MPs failed to understand that the “ILP, which draws its legitimacy from the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873… majorly failed in Arunachal as outsiders/foreigners managed to stay in the state illegally for years and also continue to root in more in numbers.”
The intensity of the influx of refugees/outsiders is so much that today they have made places in the panchayati raj institutions in some districts, while Arunachal is scheduled as a tribal state, it said.
“The agitations and resistance from every community and section of the society show that the public have completely lost their faith, trust, hopes and expectations from these two leaders,” the APCC said, adding that Rijiju and Gao had “no right to continue to represent Arunachal Pradesh in Delhi and Parliament.”
Toko said the Congress demands “immediate resignation and on-screen apology from (Rijiju and Gao) for treacherously hurting the sentiments and expectations of the public, and for not protecting the state from the unwarranted extraneous bill.”
