Agartala: The Supreme Court has issued notice to the Tripura and Assam governments seeking their responses to the petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice of India Uday Umesh Lalit and Justice S Ravindra Bhat on Monday heard as many as 220 petitions together challenging CAA and directed the Central Government to file a response besides Tripura and Assam.
Tripura royal scion and the Chief of ruling TIPRA Motha of Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (ADC) Pradyot Kishore Debbarman and present Vice President of BJP state committee Patal Kanya Jamatia had filed separate petitions challenging the validity of CAA in Supreme Court in December 2019 and February 2020, which was also heard on Monday.
Pradyot Kishore Debbarman had resigned from the president of Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) as Sonia Gandhi and Congress didn’t support his claim that CAA would paved the way for providing citizenship to the illegal migrants settled in the Northeast including Tripura, which will after sometimes change the demography of the region.
Debbarman claimed, “The indigenous inhabitants belonging to both tribal and non-tribal communities of pre-liberated East Pakistan were reduced to a minority due to heavy influx from Bangladesh after 1971 and CAA has provisioned to accept them as Indian in the name of religious persecution of minorities in Bangladesh.”
The majority tribal of hill Tripura has reduced to 31 percent over the last 50 years and as a result, development of indigenous communities has not been done expectedly, as the resources including land mass are shared. Apart from that, social peace and harmony are being disturbed due to illegal migrants, but the government attempted to sacrifice everything for their vote bank politics, he argued.
The Supreme Court has listed the matter for the next hearing on October 31 for directions. However, the bench directed to segregate the issues of Assam and Northeastern states from the other states after the petitioners’ counsels argued that the matter of northeast was completely different from other states and the spirit of CAA.
