Won’t budge an inch: Amit Shah, Piyush Goyal launch offensive in defence of CAA

Jodhpur/Mumbai: Following up the Prime Minister’s defence of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), Union ministers have stepped their evangelising mission to drum up support for the law, which excludes Muslims from seeking refuge in India if persecuted in neighbouring countries.

Home minister Amit Shah, who piloted the bill in Parliament, said in Jodhpur Friday that the government would not budge an inch on implementing the new law despite countrywide opposition to it.

BJP MPs have been asked to organise ‘awareness programmes’ on CAA nationwide. Amit Shah kicked off one such event on Friday and used the occasion to accuse the Congress and other opposition parties of running a misinformation campaign.

He said the amended law does not take away Indian citizenship from anyone but only grants it to non-Muslims from three neighbouring countries if they have come to India from three before 2015. Shah accused the Congress of playing vote-bank politics by spreading such ‘misinformation.’

Railway minister Piyush Goyal graced a similar show at the IMC Centre at Churchgate in south Mumbai. Here too the Congress was the target of attack: the opposition party was mocked for becoming "directionless" and spreading rumours in a bid to stay relevant.

“I believe the Congress has become a directionless party,” Ggoyal said. “It has slowly lost its supremacy in every state and it is forming governments in many states as a junior partner," he said.

He tok a dig at the Shiv Sena, a recently estranged ally of the BJP, which performed a strategic walkout on the citizenship amendment bill (CAB) in the Rajya Sabha after having voted for it in the Lok Sabha. "Some confused parties supported the CAB in the Lok Sabha, but after an immoral coalition with new friends, they walked away from it in the Rajya Sabha," he said.