Union Home Ministry launches mobile app for citizenship application in CAA

Union Home Ministry launched mobile app named 'CAA 2019'. This app will facilitate eligible people to apply for Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)-2019. Home Ministry officials gave information about this.

Earlier, the Home Ministry had launched a portal to apply for Indian citizenship under CAA. The CAA rules were notified on Monday. This has paved the way for granting Indian citizenship to non-Muslim practitioners coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

According to the Home Ministry spokesperson, the application can be downloaded from Google Play Store or the central government website Indiancitizenshiponline.nic.in. He said that the mobile app ‘CAA-2019’ has been started. Let us tell you that the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear on March 19 the petitions demanding a stay on the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019.

Senior lawyer Kapil Sibal mentioned the issue before Chief Justice DY Chandrachud who said the matter would be listed next week. Various CAA provisions have been challenged in more than two hundred related petitions filed in the top court since 2019. The law aims to provide faster citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who came to India due to religious persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014.

The CAA was passed by Parliament in December 2019, but the central government issued rules for it on Monday. Opposition leaders started criticizing the notification of the Act. They claimed that the notified rules were unconstitutional, discriminatory and violative of the secular principle of citizenship enshrined in the Constitution. Critics of the CAA also argued that by excluding Muslims from its scope and linking citizenship to religious identity, the law undermines the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution.