‘It passed House but CAA is violative of basic structure of Constitution’

NEWDELHI: The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government says petitioners who have approached the courts against the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act have fuelled the violent protests against the law. Congress MP Jairam Ramesh, one of the 59 petitioners, spoke to HT’S Sunetra Choudhury about why he moved court against the Act. Edited excerpts:

People like former solicitor general Harish Salve have said the CAA is constitutional. It was passed by both houses of Parliament. Why do you feel optimistic about your legal fight?

It certainly passed Parliament because of their brute majority. Nevertheless, I don’t want to comment on what Harish Salve has said; my petition is in the public domain.we have argued in the petition that this law is violative of the basic structure of the Constitution. I think all the arguments that Harish Salve has given, defending what the government has done, don’t stand the test of legal scrutiny...mr Amit Shah [Union home minister] keeps talking about the partition, but he should realize that his rewriting of history will not rewrite that history, that the Constitution came after partition, which was adopted first in 1949 and came into effect in 1950. Yes, partition was on religious lines, but by 1950, that was no longer the basis of determining citizenship. Religion as an instrument of determining citizenship was rejected by the constituent assembly. So I am sure Supreme Court will uphold my petition.

What makes you so confident ?

I still have faith in the SC, I have faith in the judiciary and I have faith in the judges who will hear this petition.

That’s the legal aspect. I want to talk about the political aspect. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of mobilisation by the students of the country... Students, youth, ordinary citizens, pensioners— and this had no political orchestration. I think Prime Minister Narendra Modi is off the mark when he says the Congress or some other party was behind this. I think this was a spontaneous burst of anger, frustration, disenchantment... It came from all sections of society and it shows there was pent-up anger...mr Amit Shah has repeatedly said that there will be a nationwide NRC, which will be a recipe for total disaster.

You are saying pent-up frustration, so does that mean it’s not just about NRC and CAA?

I think a lot of the people have been deeply disenchanted with Mr Modi. I think the economic situation has been deteriorating very, very significantly. Over the last couple of weeks, we have seen the ugly head of inflation coming up again...so, there was that feeling as well. But the trigger and proximate cause was the manner in which the Citizenship Bill was passed and the realization that this is going to be the first step in having a wholly unnecessary and unwarranted, undesirable NRC for the country.

But why is it that apart from [West Bengal chief minister] Mamata Banerjee, you don’t see the Congress or the Opposition at the forefront of these protests?

I don’t think we should be in the forefront. These are people’s movements. Let her (Banerjee) do whatever she wants... Why should every public protest have a political colour and political complexion for Mr Modi then to go to town? And for Mr Amit Shah to twist?

So who are the street fighters of the Congress?

[Rajasthan CM] Ashok Gehlot is the street fighter, [Chhattisgarh CM] Bhupesh Baghel is a street fighter. We have a large number of local-level workers who are all street fighters.