The BJP’s door-to-door “awareness campaign” on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act got off on the wrong foot in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday when a Malayalam writer whom Union minister Kiren Rijiju had chosen to meet first objected to the exclusion of Muslim refugees.
Rijiju was in Kerala to participate in the party’s Jana Samparka Paripadi (mass contact programme) to build support for the act, but the district BJP committee’s selection of the first door to knock on seemed to have backfired.
Writer George Onakkoor extended all courtesy to the visiting minister and led him to his living him. Then he told Rijiju that it was wrong to leave out one community.
“People say that six communities were specifically included in the bill. It need not be. Generally, we can say that refugees are welcome to our great country. That would have been enough,” Onakkoor told Rijiju, who calmly listened to the writer.
“This is a thought raised by a large number of people in this country,” Onakkoor said. “This is a most welcome suggestion,” the minister replied.
Rijiju, however, emphasised his party’s stand that the amended citizenship law does not discriminate against any community. He underlined how formerly Pakistani singer-actor Adnan Sami had been granted Indian citizenship.
Rijiju had decided to visit Onakkoor first perhaps because the writer had supported the BJP’s demand for a CBI investigation into the rape of two minor girls who were later found hanging inside their home in Palakkad a few months ago.
The writer later told reporters that he had some reservations about the new citizenship law.
“I don’t believe this can work only because a bill was passed in Parliament. There must be proper scrutiny of the act,” he said. “I feel that excluding one community is very dangerous for our nation.”
Onakkoor’s mobile phone was switched off when this newspaper later tried to contact him for further comments.
Before leaving Onakkoor’s home, Rijiju told reporters he wanted to meet some more people in the Kerala capital to explain the amended act’s provisions to them.
“It does not target any particular community. What I want to stress is there must be peace in the country. We will have differences of opinion in a democracy,” he later said.
