Staff Reporter
ITANAGAR, Jan 11: Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president Takam Sanjoy on Friday flayed the Modi-led BJP government for bringing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) 2016, terming it “unconstitutional, discriminatory and communal.”
The citizenship amendment bill, which was tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, has created an uproar in the entire Northeast region.
“The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 is unconstitutional, discriminatory and communal, and against the ethics and essence of the constitution of India,” Sanjoy said, briefing media persons at Rajiv Gandhi Congress Bhavan here.
Demanding that the CAB be scrapped altogether, the APCC president said: “The BJP at the centre, right from 2014 (the year it assumed power), instead of developing the country, particularly the Northeast, is trying to create chaos, communal tension, hatred and arrogance.”
Sanjoy said the decision to introduce the CAB would act as a fuel to the anti-foreigners movement in the NE region.
“India is secular; no community can be despised, according to the philosophy and ethics of our constitution,” he said.
“The citizenship bill is a complex development to counter the National Register of Citizens (NRC). When the NRC is going on in Assam to detect illegal immigrants, irrespective of religion caste and creed, why was the citizenship bill, which is meant only for Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians, brought in the Parliament?” Sanjoy said.
He termed the bill an act of “last-minute politics of the BJP to garner votes and appease a particular community to vote for the BJP.”
Sanjoy averred, however, that the BJP would not earn any benefit from the bill “except for creating communal tension against the tribals, the minorities and the ethnography of the region.”
“The bill has given scope to Bangladeshis and a few other communities, but at the same time alienated some sections,” he said.
Sanjoy castigated the Pema Khandu government in the state for being a mute spectator to the situation created by Modi by bringing the controversial bill, and urged the state government to “awaken from the slumber and immediately pass a resolution rejecting the citizenship bill.”
He also appealed to the state’s indigenous people who are in the RSS to be well-conversed with the situation.
Commenting on the bill’s potential ramifications in Arunachal Pradesh, Sanjoy said the state, despite being endowed with the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation Act, was facing a “chaotic situation on illegal immigration, and the government should not allow Arunachal to become a dumping ground.”
The APCC president also accused the state government of indulging in “bartering with government schemes, especially PMGSY projects, SIDF and SADA,” and went on to allege that the schemes were being “sold out in exchange of votes even before the notices inviting tender (NIT) are being floated.”
“The political bosses are collecting money from PMGSY projects. Ten percent money is being collected for a project. Do not force officers to collect money. I challenge them to file a defamation case against me for this statement,” Sanjoy said.
He also requested the state government to “stop using the special investigation cell and the vigilance department as tools to harass officers who want to utilize the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS).”
Sanjoy claimed that the state government was whimsically withholding the applications of some of the prospective candidates for the forthcoming assembly election who applied for VRS in order to contest the polls.
