Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi chief Prakash Ambedkar on Sunday said it didn’t matter if the National Population Register (NPR) update was being planned as per the Citizenship Rules, 2003, as the Centre was attempting to “fundamentally change” the way citizenship was granted by giving precedence to the ancestors’s birthplace over one’s own.
“Even for the Assam exercise, the same rules were used which proved disastrous,” said Mr. Ambedkar in Bhopal, at a meeting where participants pledged against not partaking in the NPR update exercise.
“Whether you go by old or the new rules, which are yet to be notified, the information the Centre will seek is not just relating to living persons but also of those who’re dead. It is changing the way citizenship is defined by the Constitution, which grants it to anyone born in the country.”
Mr. Ambedkar, three-time MP, was responding to a query on Chief Minister Kamal Nath’s recent clarification on the December 9 NPR update notification that it was issued under the 2003 Rules of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and not the CAA. “The NPR will not be implemented in the State at present,” Mr. Nath had said.
Today, the political system has paralysed,” said Mr. Ambedkar, grandson of B.R. Ambedkar, the Constitution’s architect. “When Baba Saheb was asked who should take the lead when political parties fail, he pointed to ‘We the People’ in the Preamble on the first page of the Constitution, saying he’d hoped they’d come out to save it and protect rights.”
‘False sense of hope’
Stating that the Centre was trying to generate a false sense of hope among all communities of remaining unaffected by the law, he said, “It will not only affect Muslims, as roughly 40% of Hindus too don’t have documents. In Assam’s case, around 14.3 lakh Hindus were robbed of citizenship.”