NESO renews anti-CAA protests across Northeast states

After nearly two years of hitting the pause button, several student organizations in the Northeast region renewed protests against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on Wednesday. 

Non-violent sit-in demonstrations were witnessed in all state capitals of the region. The protesters also raised the issue of the promulgation of inner-line permit regime in Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura – states that have borne the maximum brunt of illegal immigrations.

Today’s protests comes in the backdrop of statements made by Amit Shah, the Union home minister, earlier this month during a meeting with a BJP team from West Bengal that CAA will be enforced once the Covid-19 vaccination drive is complete across the country.

"The people of Northeast have not and will never embrace the CAA. The indigenous people will become a minority as a result of this action. Illegal immigrants cannot just be dumped in the Northeast,” Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharya, the chief advisor of NESO, while speaking to media in Guwahati on Tuesday said that Assam had already taken on a significant burden by taking the migrants up until March 24, 1971, and that it could not accept any more of these migrants.

NESO comprises of student bodies representing many tribal groups of Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura.

The CAA, which went into effect in December 2019, seeks to make it easier for non-Muslim migrants who arrived in India prior to 2014 but escaped religious persecution in their native countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to petition for Indian citizenship. Organizations in the Northeast, however, are opposed to it because they claim that doing so will turn indigenous groups into minorities and award Indian citizenship to a "significant number" of migrants who arrived after 1971.