Citizenship (Amendment) Act: column questions the government’s ‘mythbusters’

An opinion column has argued that the Centre’s efforts to explain the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) to its opponents are welcome but came too late, and that some official clarifications have only added to the confusion.

Outreach and protests

The government has answered critics through tweets, statements and speeches at rallies, and has held talks with Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma, whose capital Shillong has seen angry protests, as have parts of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal. The column insisted that protesters must remain strictly peaceful and protect public property and officials, warning that violence would weaken their cause. It noted that the Act was passed after debate in both Houses and has already been challenged in the Supreme Court, which, it said, should examine its fairness and not just its legality, since it affects India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In the writer’s view, the outreach should have begun much earlier, since groups in Assam had opposed the earlier version of the Bill as far back as 2018, and objections had come from politicians, including some in the BJP, as well as from students and professionals.

Questions over official claims

The column pointed out that after Bangladesh’s foreign minister A. K. Abdul Momen called off a visit to Delhi and said his country did not judge people by religion, the external affairs ministry said it had been referring to military and non-Awami League governments. Yet the Act sets December 2014 as its cut-off, while Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League has governed without a break since 2009, and earlier held office in 1996-2001.

It also questioned Press Information Bureau tweets labelled “Mythbusters”, including a claim that atrocities against minorities in Bangladesh had declined in recent years. The writer said persecution was not defined, that people migrate for many reasons, and that the government’s figure of the Hindu share of Bangladesh’s population falling from 28% to 8% did not match a statement in the Rajya Sabha by the late Sushma Swaraj, a former External Affairs Minister, that the share had in fact gone up, to 10.7% in 2017 from 8.4% in 2011.

Census data and Assam

Citing the 2011 Census, the column said Bangladeshis reported varying lengths of residence in India. According to those figures, 17.6 million had come before 1991; the number was 2.7 lakh for the period 1992-2001 and 1.09 lakh for 2002-2011, while 1.01 lakh were unsure. It noted that the accord on Assam, formally a memorandum of settlement, provided for foreigners who entered Assam illegally after March 25, 1971 to be identified, removed from electoral rolls and expelled, with no mention of religion, and asked whether pushing that cut-off forward by 43 years on religious grounds changed this.

See also: Election news

Originally published on 18 December 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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