AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has slammed Shiv Sena over its flipflop on the Citizenship Amendment Bill after Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray announced that his party will not support the bill in Rajya Sabha unless ‘things are clear’.
The Sena had supported the CAB in Lok Sabha yesterday.
Calling it ‘bhangra politics’ Owaisi lashed out at Shiv Sena, saying: “They write ‘secular’ in common minimum programme, this bill is against secularism and Article 14. It is the politics of opportunism”.
Asaduddin Owaisi on Shiv Sena supported #CitizenshipAmendmentBill2019 in Lok Sabha: This is ‘Bhangra politics’. They write ‘secular’, in common minimum programme, this bill is against secularism and Article 14. It is politics of opportunism.@asadowaisi #TV9News pic.twitter.com/DKsn7W8CH0
— Tv9 Gujarati (@tv9gujarati) December 10, 2019
In a seemingly delicate monkey-balancing act, the Shiv Sena Tuesday said it won’t support the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in the Rajya Sabha unless the Narendra Modi government incorporates changes it has asked for.
The move came just a day after it supported the same draft in the Lok Sabha, breaking ranks with its allies NCP and Congress to bring down the ideological faultlines in the recently forged ruling alliance in Maharashtra.
Interestingly, prior to voting in favour of the bill in the Lok Sabha on Monday, Shiv Sena had opposed it both in the House and in an article in its mouthpiece Saamana.
In the Saamana article, the Shiv Sena claimed that the passage of the Bill would create an “invisible partition between Hindus and Muslims”. The party also wondered whether the “selective acceptance” of Hindu undocumented immigrants would spark a religious war in India. The party alleged that practising “vote bank politics” under the guise of the Bill was not in the nation’s interests.
Read: After spewing venom against Amit Shah, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi tears copy of CAB in Lok Sabha
In the Lok Sabha, Shiv Sena MP Vinayak Raut asked why persecuted Tamils in Sri Lanka were not included in the amended law’s ambit. He asked Amit Shah to reveal how much the population would increase after the enactment of the proposed changes.
Soon after this, the party took a U-turn and voted for the Bill. Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant was quoted as saying that the party supported the bill “in the interest of the nation”. “The Common Minimum Programme is applicable only in Maharashtra,” Sawant said, referring to a programme agreed upon by the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress when they formed a government in Maharashtra on November 28.
However, soon after Rahul Gandhi’s blistering criticism of the parties who support the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 in a Tweet today, Shiv Sena’s chief Uddhav Thackeray, probably buckling under pressure, quickly made a U-turn again, declaring that he will not extend his support to the CAB until “things are cleared”.
