NDA’s perfidy on foreigner
issue [Courtesy
– The Pioneer April 26, 2005]
A Surya Prakash
A fortnight
ago, leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party were stunned by the caustic remarks
of Mr KS Sudarshan, the sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh about
the party and the quality of Government provided by the BJP when it was in
power. While senior leaders of the BJP including Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Mr
LK Advani have preferred silence to a slanging match with the RSS chief, Mr
Brajesh Mishra, who was then, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister,
has chosen to take on Mr Sudarshan.
Mr Mishra
was particularly piqued by the RSS chief’s accusation that he (Mr Mishra) was
aligned to both Ms Gandhi and the BJP. Stung by these remarks, Mr Mishra hit
back saying that Mr Sudarshan’s comments were inane and absurd. He told The
Indian Express that Mr Sudarshan was prone to making wild, fictitious
allegations.
Is Mr
Sudarshan completely off the mark or is there some basis for his accusations
against the BJP’s top leadership and the NDA Government? Given the raging
controversy within the Sangh parivar on these issues, there is need to sift
fact from fiction.
The BJP
raised the foreigner issue many years ago and made it a key campaign point in
the run-up to the 1994 as well as the 2004 elections. Meeting after meeting,
leaders of this party told voters that for the sake of national pride and
national security, they must ensure that only a natural-born Indian headed the
Union Government. Ms Sonia Gandhi, by virtue of her Italian origin, was unfit
to be the prime minister, they said. Given these assertions, the general
perception was that the party was committed to the position that naturalised
citizens should be kept out of constitutional offices. Available evidence
suggests that this is more fiction than fact.
It may surprise readers to know that despite this public
posturing, the
BJP-led Government took deliberate steps to clear the way for foreigners.
Further, while the people were made to believe that the party was fighting a
political battle with Ms Sonia Gandhi and people around her, elements in that
Government were shielding some of her friends.
There are three reasons why I say this: (i) The
cunningly executed amendment of the Citizenship Act to remove a major obstacle
in the path of naturalised citizens seeking political office in India; (ii) the
NDA Government’s preposterous assertions in an affidavit before the Delhi High
Court in a case pertaining to Ms Gandhi’s citizenship; and (iii) the NDA
Government’s refusal to grant permission to the Central Bureau of Investigation
(CBI) to prosecute Mr Satish Sharma in respect of cases pertaining to petrol
pump allotments made by him.
While the world at large believed that the BJP
leadership stood committed to barring naturalised citizens from constitutional
offices, the Government led by it pushed through the Citizenship (Amendment)
Bill, 2003, in the Rajya Sabha on December 18, 2003. It was introduced in the
Lok Sabha the very next day and passed by that House on December 22.
Thereafter, the Government acted hastily to obtain the President’s assent on
January 7, 2004.
The
Statement of Objects and Reasons appended to the Bill claimed that it had two
main purposes: Creation of a new category of citizens called Overseas Citizens,
to grant dual citizenship to the Indian diaspora, and introduction of a scheme
for compulsory registration of every citizen of India and issuance of national
identity cards. These objectives were indeed laudable, but embedded in these
provisions was a politically significant pro-foreigner provision, which the
Statement of Objects made no mention of!
The
amendment, which had the effect of weakening the case against naturalised
citizens like Ms Sonia Gandhi, was that relating to Section 5 of the Act. The
section refers to a category of citizens called Citizens by Registration, which
includes foreigners who marry Indian citizens. Section 5 said that subject to
such conditions and restrictions as may be prescribed, such persons could be
granted citizenship. This Section also had a proviso which was most
inconvenient for Citizens by Registration. It said: "Provided that in
prescribing the conditions and restrictions subject to which persons of any
such country may be registered as citizens of India under this clause, the
Central Government shall have due regard to the conditions subject to which
citizens of India may, by law or practice of that country, become citizens of
that country by registration."
Deciphering
this mumbo-jumbo: With such a law coming into force, if a foreigner marries an
Indian citizen and applies for Indian citizenship, the Government should, while
granting citizenship to that person, impose such conditions and restrictions as
may be imposed on an Indian seeking citizenship under similar circumstances in
the applicant’s country of origin. In other words, this proviso makes it
incumbent on the Government to ensure reciprocity to ensure that a Citizen by
Registration does not acquire civil and political rights which are not
available to Indians seeking citizenship in the applicant’s country. Strange
but true, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill deleted this important proviso
removing the biggest legal impediment faced by foreigners nurturing political
ambitions. The NDA could not have given a better gift to Ms Gandhi! Why did the
NDA Government remove this provision? Why was it done in stealth? Who in the
Government was batting for Ms Gandhi?
That the
Government’s intentions were not sanguine are obvious from the Statement of
Objects and Reasons that was appended to that Bill. Apart from the fact that it
made no reference to the deletion of this important proviso, it actually tried
to mislead Members of Parliament and citizens by saying that the purpose of the
amending bill was to make acquisition of Indian citizenship by registration and
naturalisation more stringent!
The other
act of the BJP-led Government which ran contrary to its public utterances
vis-à-vis the foreigner issue, was the Counter Affidavit filed by the Central
Government before the Delhi High Court on September 5, 2001, in the Rashtriya
Mukti Morcha Case. In this affidavit, the Government repeatedly asserted that
there was only one class of citizens in the country. Once citizenship is
acquired, there remained no distinction in the citizens thereafter, it said.
This assertion, which is blatantly false, was made 17 times in the said
Affidavit.
Anyone who
reads ‘The Citizenship Act, 1955′ can see the distinction between Citizens by
Birth and other category of citizens. While citizenship is permanent for
Citizens by Birth, it is impermanent in respect of Citizens by Registration and
Citizens by Naturalisation. No Government has the power to interfere with the
citizenship of a Citizen by Birth.
However, the
citizenship of those who come under the other categories is subject to
conditions and restrictions. These citizens have to comply with the conditions
stipulated in Section 10 of the Act at all times. Should citizens falling under
these categories violate these provisions, their citizenship can be cancelled.
Further, this affidavit was filed on September 5, 2001, when the proviso to
Section 5 of the Act (reciprocity clause) was still intact. Therefore, the
argument, "There is no distinction among different categories of
citizens," was, to say the least, preposterous.
Finally, a
word on the NDA Government’s kindness towards Ms Gandhi’s friends. The most
glaring example was the Government’s refusal to grant permission to the CBI to
prosecute Mr Satish Sharma. While its own minister Mr Ram Naik was pilloried by
the Congress party for favouring friends in the allotment of petrol pumps, the
BJP was unwilling to permit the CBI to proceed against former Petroleum
Minister Satish Sharma, who faced similar charges.
Who in the
NDA Government had put a protective shield around Satish Sharma? Who was behind
the hidden agenda in the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2003 and the affidavit?
There are obviously some embedded Sonia-men in the BJP. The BJP cannot hope to
retrieve its lost ground unless its top leadership is ready to identify those
who betrayed the cause, and weed them out.
__________________________________________________________________
That brings us to the most important questions:
How Citizenship Act was diluted to facilitate Sonia Gandhi to
become Prime Minister?
Who was Home Minister, custodian of Citizenship Act? Ans : LK
Advani.
Who was the Law Minister acted in speed to get amendments in
Citizenship Act passed and approved? Ans : Arun Jaitley
Why Prime Minister AB Vajpayee allowed crucial Amendments in
Citizenship Act?
Because, Vajpayee and his
family started hidden deals with Sonia Gandhi and her family by early
2000. Vajpayee’s highflying fixer
bureaucrats Brajesh Mishra & NK Singh were in the loop of all deals with
Sonia Gandhi.
Any way due to the
unexpected intervention of Dr.Subramanian Swamy before President APJ Abdul
Kalam in the last days, spoiled her dreams and Sonia was forced to select the
puppet Manmohan Singh for the post of Prime Minister.
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