Owaisi, Kerala Govt move apex court against CAA

New Delhi, March 16

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi and the Kerala Government have moved the Supreme Court seeking to restrain the Centre from implementing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, for which the rules were notified recently.

More than four years after Parliament passed the CAA, the Centre had on March 11 paved the way for its implementation by notifying the CAA rules, fast-tracking Indian citizenship for undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, who entered India before December 31, 2014. The SC had on Friday agreed to take up 237 petitions against the CAA and the recently notified CAA rules on March 19.

Owaisi, one of the petitioners, has sought a stay on the implementation of the CAA till the disposal of the petitions challenging its constitutional validity. He sought a direction to the Centre that “no applications seeking grant of citizenship status be entertained or processed by the respondents herein under Section 6B of the Citizenship Act, 1955, (as it stands amended by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act-2019) during the pendency of the proceedings”. The Kerala Government, which had filed an original suit under Article 131 of the Constitution challenging the constitutionality of the CAA, too sought an interim injunction restraining the Centre from implementing the CAA. “The CAA rules notified much after the enactment of the Impugned Act indicates that the Union of India is aware that there is no urgency in implementing the provisions of the Act. It is submitted that the fact that the defendant itself has no urgency in the implementation of the impugned Act itself is a sufficient cause for staying the rules,” the Kerala Government said.