Top India court defers hearing on citizenship law

NEW DELHI • India's top court has deferred a hearing on cases challenging the constitutional validity of a new law that introduced religion-based criteria for citizenship. The new law had sparked a month of often violent protests across the country.

A three-judge panel headed by Chief Justice of India Sharad Arvind Bobde yesterday said a larger Constitution bench would consider requests to stop Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government from implementing the Citizenship Amendment Act.

The case will be heard again in five weeks, the court said, without giving a date.

At stake is the secular fabric of the Indian Constitution and democracy, according to critics of the new law. It allows undocumented migrants of all faiths except Islam from neighbouring Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to seek Indian citizenship.

Petitioners - including students, Muslim groups, lawyers and politicians - say such discrimination on the basis of religion is not permitted under the Constitution.

Mr Modi's government has maintained the new law aims to give citizenship to persecuted minorities from the three countries and the protests are the result of fear-mongering by the opposition. India's Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal told the court the government was opposed to a stay of the Act or postponing the process of preparing a National Population Register.

"The Act gives large powers to executive officers," said lawyer K.V. Vishwanathan, who is arguing against the law. "There is fear not just among Muslims, but anxiety among a large majority as well."

Mr Modi and his party leaders, including Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah, have said the citizenship law is a precursor to a proposed national register of citizens aimed at "(weeding) out illegal infiltrators".

The law was the third big push for Mr Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party's hardline Hindu nationalist agenda after he won a second term in office last year with a sweeping majority. In August, the government scrapped nearly seven decades of autonomy in Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority state.

In November, the Supreme Court handed a victory to Hindu groups over Muslim petitioners in a centuries-old dispute over the ownership of a plot of land claimed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.

BLOOMBERG, REUTERS