By Matters India Reporter
Mumbai, Feb 18, 2020: Around 30 women, including five Catholic nuns, representing 21 organizations in Maharashtra have pressed Sharad Pawar, the chairperson of the state’s ruling coalition, to get a resolution passed in the assembly against some controversial laws on citizenship.
The representatives working among the marginalized explained to Shard Pawar, head of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (Great Development Front), that the National Population Register (NPR), National Register of Citizens (NRC)and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will adversely affect groups such as tribals, Dalits, laborers, slum dwellers, rag pickers, and sex workers.
The February 17 meeting was held on the backdrop of Maharashtra announcing implementation of NPR from May 1. Pawar is also the leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), one of the constituents of the ruling coalition.
Besides Pawar, the coalition comprises Uddhav Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena and the state chief minister, and Sonia Gandhi, the acting president of the Indian National Congress.
The women delegates came from Mumbai, Dahanu, Raigad, Pune, and Sangli, major towns in Maharashtra. They also explained how the police harassed people protesting peacefully against the CAA in Mumbai.
The CAA, passed by the two houses of the Indian parliament and endorsed by the president mid December 2019, provides for granting citizenship to all migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan except Muslims.
Pawar, who is also a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house in the parliament, told the women that his party shares the concerns of those protesting CAA. But as a coalition government they need to dialogue with the state chief minister on the matter. He promised to talk to the chief minister on the matters soon.
The Shiv Sena, a pro-Hindu party, supports the citizenship laws.
NCP leaders Supriya Sule, and Jitendra Avadh were present when the women met Pawar.
Avad suggested taking the women delegation to the chief minister so that they could explain to him how the controversial laws would affect different groups. The NCP leaders also reassured the group that they would look into the police cases against the protesters.
Later, the women groups and other activists decided to hold a protest against NPR before the assembly session begins. They also plan to meet on February 23 at Hutatma Chowk, Fort, Mumbai.
The Catholic nuns in the delegation, belonging to the Maharashtra unit of the Justice Coalition of Religious, submitted a memorandum to Pawar. The coalition has 36 nuns, brothers and priests from 16 religious congregations in the state.
Brinelle D’Souza, West India consultant for the coalition, said that the NPR and NRC would bring huge hardship and financial burden to the marginalized in proving their citizenship. The poorest and marginalized of all faiths would be affected, she added.
The coalition members in the delegation were Annie Fernandes, Daphne Furtado, Margaret Gonsalves, and Rosaline Pereira.
D’Souza said the Christian community rejected the CAA, NPR and NRC as unconstitutional, discriminatory and divisive and pits minorities against each other.
In the memorandum to Pawar explained that the Christian group had met January 16-18 in Mumbai for a workshop on capacity-building titled, “Rights-based Advocacy in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals.”
Deeply committed to a just and rights-based implementation of the SDGs, the group said the negative fallout of the nationwide NPR-NRC-CAA exercise would disproportionately harm the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized and nullify the efforts toward SDG.
“Citizenship in India has always been based on the non-negotiable principles of equality and non-discrimination. When our country became independent in 1947 and when it gave itself a Constitution in 1950, laying the edifice of our proud Republic, it accepted that people of all faiths, creeds, castes, languages, and genders are Indian equally and without discrimination,” the memorandum says.
According to the Christian group, the CAA is the first instance of religion being overtly used as criterion for citizenship under Indian nationality laws and therefore fundamentally discriminatory and divisive in nature. “It is at odds with secular principles enshrined in the Constitution and contradicts Articles 13, 14, 15, 16 and 21, which guarantee to every citizen the right to equality, equality before the law, and non-discriminatory treatment by the State.”
The law also undermines India’s commitment to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and other human rights treaties to which the country is a signatory, the group asserted.