The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) has been attracting protests and criticism from all over the country for its unconstitutional and sectarian outlook. The act that grants Indian Citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, who came to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan by December 31, 2014 has left out one of the biggest refugee base in India from it’s ambit.
We are talking about the Sri Lankan Tamils. More than 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils live in India, most of whom migrated during the rise of militancy in Sri Lanka, in particular during the Sri Lankan Civil War, which lasted from 1983 to 2009.
A majority of these Sri Lankans are settled in the southern states of Tamil Nadu (in the cities of Chennai, Madurai, Tiruchirappalli, and Coimbatore), Karnataka (in Bangalore), and Kerala. The Indian Tamils were the most persecuted community in the Buddhist dominated Island nation of Sri Lanka. It is in Sri Lanka that the highest number of Hindu Tamils have been killed
The CAA which the government has been presenting as a legislation for the effect of persecuted non-Muslim communities in the neighboring countries has left the government unanswerable on the question of Sri Lankan Tamils.
A good percentage of the Sri Lankan Tamils are Hindu. Still they can’t get Indian Citizenship as the government of India don’t consider them persecuted under the ambit of CAA and makes them ineligible for the citizenship.
Makkal Needhi Maiam founder Kamal Haasan asked the government through is tweet about the exclusion of Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims from CAA. He tweeted, “Why are Tamils who are subjected to a methodic genocide and Muslims facing discrimination, be excluded from the bill? If it’s a genuinely benevolent bill and not a vote garnering exercise, then why won’t this CAB stop to pick up stranded Tamils & troubled Muslims of Sri Lanka?”
The DMK President M.K. Stalin also questioned the government in this regards and said, that Are Sri Lankan Tamils not Hindus? He further said that the legislation discriminated against Muslims and divided the people on religious lines.
Also Read: Government Gets A Breather As Supreme Court Refuses Stay On CAA
The protest against the act has been boiling the country in protest from past week and today the Supreme Court refused to put a stay on the implementation of the act and listed it for hearing next month . The petition for the exclusion of Sri Lankan Tamils is likely to be the part of subsequent hearings in the matter in front of apex judiciary.
