Gandhi, Nehru, Manmohan favoured helping persecuted minorities in neighbouring countries: Nadda

Follow us on

BJP working president J P Nadda on Saturday accused the Opposition of misleading people on the CAA and said Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Manmohan Singh supported the idea of helping religious minorities facing persecution in neighbouring countries. Addressing a group of minority refugees from Pakistan at the party headquarters in New Delhi, he alleged that the Opposition is spreading misinformation that crores of refugees would enter India due to the enactment of the law and it will become difficult to handle them.

The law is for those who have come to India, with December 31, 2014, as the cut-off date, he said.

Nadda said people are also being misled that they would lose their citizenship after the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) is enacted.

"The law gives and does not take away citizenship," he said.

"When the Modi government enacted the citizenship amendment law, on the basis of which the refugees are getting citizenship, the Opposition started misleading the people for vote bank politics," he said.

The BJP leader said India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi had supported the idea of helping persecuted minorities in Pakistan in 1947.

In 1948, Nehru had said that a relief fund should help the persecuted people in Pakistan, he said.

Nadda said Congress leader Manmohan Singh had urged the then home minister L K Advani in Rajya Sabha in December 2003 to do something about the persecution of minorities in Bangladesh.

"Now that Modi ji has done it (enacted the CAA), they are trying to gain political mileage out of it (by opposing it)," he said.

Amending the citizenship law was part of the BJP's thought process from the very beginning and found place in the party's manifesto, Nadda told the gathering.

"The people of the country gave us strength, elected our MPs who enacted the law. This is how you are being given citizenship," he said.