NEW DELHI: The CPM on Friday said the protest by women at Shaheen Bagh was like the non-cooperation movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi against the British rule over India.

Describing Shaheen Bagh as a symbol of protest, former CPM MP Hannan Mollah said it had, like Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, emerged as a new method of protesting without violating laws or breaking rules.”

For over 69 days now, women protestors have demanded the repeal of the CAA law, and a roll back of NRC and NPR .

Even as Supreme Court-appointed senior lawyers Sanjay Hegde, Sadhna Ramachandran and former CIC Wajahat Habibullah continued their conversation with the protesting women of Shaheen Bagh, CPM chief Sitaram Yechury reiterated the need for the government to scrap the controversial CAA, and pull back on NRC and the altered NPR.

Taking a dig at the “chronology” of the government’s announcements of the contentious laws, Yechury said all three “endanger the very status of the majority of our people”. He contended that instead of securing people’s lives, CAA-NRC and NPR will in fact compel them to spend a lifetime “securing papers”.

“CAA-NRC-NPR “chronology” and methods, all endanger the very status of the majority of our people. Instead of securing their lives, they will spend a lifetime securing papers. Modi govt must stop NPR and repeal CAA,” Yechury said on Twitter.

The Left leader also referred to a study conducted by Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerji and Esther Duflo’s institute J-PAL, which established that there are very high risks of harassment of genuine poor and marginalised sections by terming their papers false and their documents dubious.

The J-PAL report, which was compiled after a survey of over 3,900 households in Jharkhand found that of the 88% of the ration cards that were cancelled as a part of a document-driven filtering process three years ago, were actually genuine households. “The CAA-NRC-NPR is devised for this harassment,” Yechury said, quoting the report.

