KOLKATA: On Tuesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act is a national law and accused West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of misleading the public about it. Speaking at a meeting held behind closed doors at the National Library in this city for members of the state BJP’s social media and IT wings, Shah stated that the party is committed to putting the CAA into effect. Shah expressed confidence that the party will win over 35 of the 42 state-sponsored Lok Sabha seats. The saffron camp had 18 seats in the 2019 polls. The media cell of the Bengal BJP released a summary of Shah’s remarks from the private event.It also released a few video snippets of Shah’s speech later in the evening. “After the next assembly elections, we need to work towards forming a BJP government in West Bengal. At the party programme, he made the statement that “a BJP government will mean the end of infiltration, cow smuggling, and providing citizenship to religiously persecuted people through CAA,” from which the BJP’s media wing shared a video clip. Shah attacked Banerjee harshly for deceiving the public about the CAA issue. “She occasionally tries to mislead the populace, the refugees, about whether or not the CAA will be implemented in the nation. I want to be very clear: CAA is the law of the land, and nobody has the authority to halt its application. This is our party’s commitment,” he declared. The CAA, which was approved by Parliament in 2019, has been opposed by the TMC, led by Mamata Banerjee. The implementation of the contentious CAA was a key electoral platform for the BJP in the previous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. The leaders of the saffron party believe it to be a plausible factor that contributed to the BJP’s rise in Bengal. Persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who came to India on or before December 31, 2014, such as Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and Christians, are to be granted Indian citizenship through the CAA.
