M.V. Rajeev Gowda, MP, and Swapan Dasgupta , BJP member and presidential nominee to the Rajya Sabha, debated on citizenship and recent developments at the IIMB’s inaugural session of ‘Suvāda’.

The debate topic was ‘CAA, NRC and the idea of India’. Suvāda, an IIM-B initiative, is a public platform where issues of public importance, significance, and relevance will be discussed to provide a neutral space for informed discussions.

“We cannot see the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in isolation. It has to be seen as a larger project which the current dispensation has been pursuing for a long time and has been its ideological basis of giving privilege to one religion over every other,” said Mr. Gowda.

Mr. Dasgupta argued that the CAA did not have the power to take away citizenship of anyone in the country, and that NRC was a fast track provision to grant citizenship to other refugees or illegal immigrants, taking into consideration specific historical circumstances. “The primary beneficiaries of CAA are the Bengalis who came to India from Bangladesh during and after the 1971 war. NRC is an exercise of identifying who are and who are not citizens in the country. Such a project has been long overdue as we are by nature, largely under-documented,” he said.

He said that the BJP had not expected such a strong and sustained resistance.