Citizenship Amendment Bill: Maharashtra IPS Officer Quits In Protest

A Maharashtra IPS officer, Abdur Rahman, announced on Wednesday that he had put in his resignation to the state government as an act of civil disobedience as the Rajya Sabha passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill . 

Rahman, who is the special IGP of Mumbai, took to Twitter and said, “The #CitizenshipAmendmentBill2019 is against the basic feature of the Constitution. I condemn this Bill. In civil disobedience I have decided not attend office from tomorrow. I am finally quitting the service.” 

Rehman also said, “This Bill is against the religious pluralism of India. I request all justice loving people to oppose the bill in a democratic manner. It runs against the very basic feature of the Constitution.” 

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A day after the bill was passed in the Lok Sabha , Rahman had said that Home Minister Amit Shah had presented wrong facts when presenting the bill in Parliament. He had also called the bill an “anathema to the Constitution”. 

“During the passage of the Bill, wrong facts, misleadingly information, wrong logic were produced by the HM. History was distorted. The idea behind the bill is to stoke fear in Muslims and divide the nation. We condemn,” Rahman had said on Twitter on 10 December. 

Even as the northeast burns in the aftermath of the passage of the bill, many including politicians and political activists have warned against it, and even called for a civil disobedience movement. 

Political activist Umar Khalid told Huffpost India in an interview , “We have to launch a civil disobedience against the NRC because it is impossible for 20 crore people to have their documents ready. There is no organisation that has the resources to get their documents made. You will have to fight this battle. It’s not something that you think you can cooperate with and come out of it.” 

While Shah has repeatedly claimed that the people of India have nothing to fear as long the Modi government is in power, Constitutional expert Faizan Mustafa told Huffpost India , “The CAB if linked to the National Register of Citizens will bring in more chaos. When it implemented NRC in Assam, presumed that ‘illegal’ Muslim migrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan will be excluded in large numbers. But in reality, this number turned out to be less and it was found that migration from Pakistan was near nil and that from Bangladesh was less than expected. It seems like the only way to exclude Muslims was to bring in religious classification which is arbitrary in nature.”