One promise in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2019 “Sankalp Patra” raised the hackles of the entire left-liberal establishment like no other. It was the promise to implement the National Register of Citizens (NRC) throughout the country, to identify and remove all illegal migrants, except Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

Essentially, the BJP committed itself to enacting the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 which changes the definition of illegal migrants by providing citizenship to illegal migrants belonging to these six religions from these three countries.

The Bill also seeks to reduce the requirement of 11 years of continuous stay in the country to six years, to obtain citizenship by naturalisation. One ‘constitutional expert’ testifying before the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Bill said, “mentioning minority communities, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, and Christians, is violative of the Constitution…it (bill) may be thrown out by the Supreme Court within minutes.”

This was the basic objection of all MPs who opposed the bill before the JPC and is likely to be the fount of any challenge it may face in court once it becomes law.

Article 14 of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable classification of anyone for the purpose of state benefits. There are two limbs to this guarantee - (a) any classification must be founded on ‘intelligible differentia’ which distinguishes persons that are grouped together from others left out of the group and (b) the differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law.

Most critics of the Citizenship Bill believe that there is no rational relation between a law granting citizenship to people and classification based on religion. The current leader of Opposition, Adhir Ranjan Choudhary, had raised the following objections before the JPC: