Kerala has lodged a fresh petition in the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024, claiming that it is discriminatory, arbitrary and contravened the principles of secularism.
The Central government on March 11 paved the way for the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, with the notification of the relevant rules, four years after it was passed in the Parliament to fast-track Indian citizenship for undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who came to India before December 31, 2014.
Describing the CAA Rules as unconstitutional, the Kerala government stated that classifications based on religion and country are discriminatory, arbitrary, unreasonable, and contravened the principles of secularism. The plea noted that the fact that the Centre itself has no urgency in the implementation of the 2019 Act is a sufficient cause for staying the 2024 rules.
Earlier, the Kerala government had filed an original suit against the validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The suit mentioned that the Amendment Act and Rules and Orders are bereft of any standard principle or norm in discriminating migrants from other countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bhutan, that share international borders with India and to which and from which there has been trans-border migration.
Mentioning that the CAA was arbitrary, the state said the Rules was a class legislation that fast-tracked procedures for granting Indian citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian members who came to India on or before December 31, 2014 from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan.
The plea noted that classifications based on religion and country are manifestly discriminatory, adding that 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 Supreme Court had on Friday agreed to hear on March 19 the pleas seeking a direction to the Centre to stay the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2024 till the disposal of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019.