Page 20 - 31DEC2019E-4
P. 20
CoverStory
held protest demonstrations. Over 300 students and The Citizenship (Amendment) Act grants Indian
citizens staged a protest at the Savitribai Phule Pune citizenship to six non-Muslim communities — Hindus,
University (SPPU) campus on December 16 evening. Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians and Parsis — from
In Trivandrum, water cannons were used on the Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan if they came to
protesters who were demanding rethink and scrap India before 2014. It has been widely criticised as being
the CAA. Police detained 70 protesters there. openly communal and anti-Muslim.
The AMU campus is under heavy patrolling and In Assam, five people have lost their lives after the
strict surveillance, being communally sensitive place police opened fire on protesters at different spots. The
of Uttar Pradesh. AMU Registrar Abdul Hamid said Northeast has been seeing large-scale protests against
that the police entered the campus late December the Act, as people feel indigenous cultures and liveli-
15 night and clashes were reported from inside. The hoods will be under threat if immigrants from Bangla-
police arrested 21 persons in connection with the stu- desh are granted citizenship. The Act also violates the
dents-police clash at the AMU. “Named FIR has been Assam Accord of 1985.
lodged against 56 persons and others unidentified. Charges under the amended Unlawful Activities
The process of hostel evacuation is on and 25-30 per (Prevention) Act have been filed against Assam leader
cent of them have been vacated, rest expected to be Akhil Gogoi, who was arrested in the second week
vacated by December 17 evening,” SSP (Aligarh) Akash of December. Under the new law, the Centre could
Kulhary said. label him as a “terrorist” without any opportunity of
20
