By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, January 29: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is preparing the poll pitch in West Bengal by once raising the electoral plank of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CCA). Union Minister Shantanu Thakur has said that the CAA will be implemented across the country within seven days.
The BJP has begun heating up the poll pot in West Bengal ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. West Bengal had played a key role in the BJP winning 303 Lok Sabha seats in 2019. The BJP had won a total of 18 Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2019. In 2014, the BJP had won just two Lok Sabha seats.
The rich haul of the Lok Sabha seats for the BJP had come on the back of the party promising to implement the CAA across the country in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. However, even after four years of the passage of the CAA by parliament, the government is yet to implement it as the rules are said to have not yet been framed.
Thakur, who is a Lok Sabha MP from West Bengal, said that the Central government would implement the CAA in the country within a week. It may be noted that the extension for framing the rules of the CAA is upto March this year. If the government doesn’t come out with rules of the law, it may have to seek another extension from parliament.
The CAA envisages citizenships of India to the persecuted members of the minority communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Rough estimates suggest that there are five crores members of the Matua community in West Bengal. They form the scheduled castes group. Half of them are said to be not citizens of India despite staying in the country for several decades. The BJP is eyeing the votes of the Matua community in the Lok Sabha elections once again.
Union Minister for Home Affairs Amit Shah in his last visit to Kolkata had asserted that no power can stop the implementation of the CAA. He had challenged the West Bengal Chief Minister to stop the implementation of the CAA in the state.
The urgency on the part of the BJP to revive the CAA poll plank is seemingly because of a largescale exodus of the party leaders to the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The BJP unit in the state is also facing internal dissension.
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