Members of the Udupi unit of ‘We the people of India’ and other like-minded organisations sat on a day-long Satyagraha in front of the Deputy Commissioner’s Office here on Thursday opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citizens (NRC).

G. Rajashekhar, writer, inaugurated the programme, and explained how the CAA, NPR, and NRC were discriminatory. William Martis, social activist, said that they were aimed at one particular minority community.

The CAA discriminated on the basis of religion and was against the basic ideals of the Constitution such as justice, freedom, liberty and fraternity. It was against the international human rights convention, he said.

The NRC was an unnecessary and cumbersome exercise. It would be a costly exercise and lead to legal and other difficulties. People would have to struggle to get old documents. They would have to stand in long queues for collecting and amending old documents and getting new documents, he said.

A large number of people belonging to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, semi-nomadic and nomadic tribes, and those who were illiterates, landless and homeless in both urban and rural areas did not have the required documents for NRC.

Their failure to produce the required documents would land them into the detention centres. There was no need for such discriminatory laws which would only put people to a lot of hardship, he said.

Amrit Shenoy, social activist, said that the Narendra Modi government had a history of troubling people with ill-thought of measures such as demonetisation. The Bharatiya Janata Party made grand promises during elections and later forgot them.

The Modi government only played the nationalist card time and again to push its failures in managing the economy and its performance under the carpet, he said.