The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will be enforced as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic gets over, Union home minister Amit Shah said in West Bengal on Thursday.

Amit Shah said, “Trinamool Congress (TMC) is spreading rumours that CAA will not be implemented, but I am telling you that after corona we will implement CAA.”

“CAA was a reality, CAA is a reality and CAA will be a reality. Nothing has changed,” he added.

Passed by the Parliament in December 2019, the CAA allows non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi and Christian — to acquire Indian citizenship in order to escape persecution in their home countries. Under the Act, people from these communities who came to India before December 31, 2014, will not be treated as illegal immigrants but given Indian citizenship.

The TMC insists that the law is unconstitutional as it links citizenship to faith in a secular country. Bengal’s Dalit Matua community has demanded immediate implementation of the CAA.

The Union Home Minister also said that the government is developing a national database to monitor Hawala transactions, terrorist funding, and terrorist activities among others while inaugurating the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) Bengaluru premises.

“The union government will soon be developing a national database to monitor hawala transactions, terrorist funding, counterfeit currency, narcotics, bomb threats, illegal arms smuggling and other terrorist activities,” Shah said.

“With the help of data analytics and information technology, there should be a paradigm shift in the current way of working of agencies,” he said, as he expressed hope that NATGRID will fulfil the responsibility of linking various sources of data.

The security concerns of today have changed fundamentally when contrasted with the prior security challenges as far as information, extension and complexity, Shah said, accordingly, there is a requirement for legal and security agencies to have automated, secure and immediate access to information obtained from reliable sources.

By Subhechcha Gamguly