New Delhi, Mar 13 (Representative) An application was filed on Tuesday in the Supreme Court by the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), which is one of the petitioners who have challenged the citizenship law, seeking the court’s direction to ensure no coercive action is taken against people belonging to the Muslim community pending adjudication of the writ petitions. Muslims cannot apply for Indian citizenship under the CAA. IUML has urged the apex court to direct the Centre to provisionally permit people belonging to the Muslim community also to apply for citizenship and submit a report on their entitlement. A separate application has also been filed by the Democratic Youth Federation of India seeking a stay on the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024.
Political party IUML is the lead petitioner in the batch of about 200 writ petitions pending in the Supreme Court challenging the CAA. IUML filed an interlocutory application in the pending writ petition seeking an immediate stay of the implementation of the CAA.In its application, IUML urged the court to stay the “continued operation of the provisions of Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and Citizenship Amendment Rules 2024, which would result in valuable rights being created and citizenship being granted to persons belonging to only certain religions, thereby resulting in a fait accompli situation, during the pendency of the present writ petition.” “If in case this court finally decided the CAA as unconstitutional, then these people who would have got citizenship under the impugned Act and rules would have to be deprived of their citizenship or stripped of their citizenship, which would create the anomalous situation,” it said. “Therefore, it is in the best interest of every person to defer the implementation of CAA and impugned rules till this court finally decides the matter,” the application said.
It said the Act was passed in 2019, and the government waited for over four years to notify the rules. “The government did not consider it urgent to implement it for the past 4.5 years. Therefore, to wait until the final decision of this court would not affect anybody’s rights or interests,” the application said. The IUML had in its petition that it was not against giving citizenship to migrants. “However, its position is that this is legislation that is based on the exclusion of religion. Since the CAA discriminates based on religion, it strikes at the root of the concept of secularism, which is the basic structure of the Constitution,” it said. With the unveiling of the rules on Monday, days ahead of the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections, the Modi government will now start granting Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians — from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The rules come into force with immediate effect, according to a gazette notification.