Activists plan to corner BJP, citizenship rules make parties devise new strategies
Telegraph | 15 March 2024
Several civil society groups in Bengal have begun drawing up plans to launch a campaign against the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls as part of a larger state-wide protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which came into effect on Monday following a Union home ministry gazette notification.
As the first step towards forming a broad alliance of like-minded organisations to build a movement against the CAA, a meeting of groups of several social activists, civil society members and politicians is convened on March 16 at the seminar hall of the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta.
Those organisations, sources, said are planning to start a "no vote to BJP" campaign, similar to the 2021 Assembly polls.
“The CAA-2019 notification is a sinister ploy to sow discord and division across the country ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The notification amounts to the institutionalisation of the NRC (National Register of Citizens) process, too. This is the time to unite and make people aware of how the government is committing fraud in the name of giving citizenship,” Prasenjit Bose, the convenor of the Joint Forum Against NRC, an umbrella organisation of like-minded outfits.
“There are refugees in Bengal and many of them have serious citizenship issues.... The promise of solving all their problems with the CAA is nothing but a fraud. We will reach out to people across the state, especially in border areas, to convince them not to fall in the CAA trap and refuse the BJP so that there is a natural rejection of this contentious legislation,” said Bose.
Members of the forum are planning to hold several programmes and door-to-door campaigns in Matua-dominated areas.
Around 30 persons from different fields of society on Tuesday evening released a joint statement, decrying the central moves. The signatories included Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar, CPM leader Fuad Halim, actor and theatre artiste Koushik Sen and economist Jayati Ghosh.
Tapasili Federation — an outfit of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBC people — on Wednesday wrote to Union home minister Amit Shah demanding unconditional citizenship to all those who had come from Bangladesh. “How do those people who left their homes in Bangladesh almost empty-handed get the proof of their connection with their neighbouring countries? The people are not even visiting the citizenship website for fear of being identified as illegal immigrants,” said Mrityunjay Mallik, the national president of the outfit.