Chennai
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday claimed that 2,838 Pakistanis were among the refugees given Indian citizenship in the last six years as she attempted to defend the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 that has sparked widespread protests in the country, Times of India reported. “In the last six years, as many as 2838 Pakistani refugees, 914 Afghan refugees, 172 Bangladeshi refugees including Muslims have been given Indian citizenship,” Sitharaman, a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is quoted as saying by the publication. “From 1964 to 2008, more than 4,00,000 Tamils [from Sri Lanka] have been given Indian citizenship,” Sitharaman said at ‘Programme on Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019’ in Chennai. The programme is the Indian government’s attempt to gather support for the discriminatory legislation. The Indian minister further said that till 2014 some 566 Muslims had migrated to India from Bangladesh and Afghanistan, claiming that the BJP government had granted close to 1,595 citizenships to Pakistani migrants and 391 to Muslims from Afghanistan between 2016-2018. It was also during the same period in 2016, that Adnan Sami was given Indian citizenship,” said the Indian minister. “This is an example.”—AP
