The State of Kerala has moved an application in the Supreme Court seeking an injunction against the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024.
The State said the Centre took over five years to notify the Rules. This itself indicated that the Union government was in no hurry to implement the law which discriminated against Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh on the grounds of religion and country.
“The fact that the defendant (Union) itself has no urgency in the implementation of the 2019 Act is a sufficient cause for staying the 2024 Rules,” the State, which had earlier filed an original suit against the validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), argued.
Noting that the CAA was “arbitrary”, the State said the Rules was a “class legislation” that fast-tracked procedure for granting Indian citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community members who entered into India on or before December 31, 2014 from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan.
The effect of the implementation of the Act and the Rules would be “hostile discrimination”.
“Classifications based on religion and country are manifestly discriminatory… It is trite and settled law that a legislation discriminating on the basis of an intrinsic and core trait of an individual cannot form a reasonable classification based on an intelligible differentia,” the State contended.
Neither the Act nor the Rules provide a rationale for identifying migrants from certain specified religious communities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh as worthy of “separate and special treatment”.
Kerala questioned why migrants from Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bhutan, which also share an international boundary with India, were excluded.
