The Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) has dared Chief Minister (CM) Sarbananda Sonowal to make his stand clear on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016.
Their call came in a statement issued on Wednesday.
Introduced in India’s Lok Sabha in July 2016, the bill aims to provide citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who left Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to escape religious persecution.
The APCC reiterated that Congress is in favour of a resolution of the vexed foreigners issue on the basis of the Assam Accord.
But the incumbent chief minister, who is also an erstwhile All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) leader, has been toeing the line of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is willing to roll out the red carpet for post-1971 illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, it added.
The Assam Accord was the outcome of a six-year long anti-foreigners agitation in Assam spearheaded by the AASU itself. The accord was signed on August 15, 1975. AASU was one of the signatories.
The APCC statement further stated that CM Sonowal has been trying to brush aside all charges of failure in governance and inability to transform election promises into reality by taking recourse to falsehood and daubing all his critics as Congress moles.
For that matter, he has not even spared the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), which is a junior partner of Assam’s coalition government, it said.
AGP’s student wing AASU has expressed doubt over the CM’s honesty and sincerity pertaining to his commitment towards the indigenous people of Assam. Therefore the CM must come clear on these issues as well, said the APCC.
