Brussels: As the European Parliament met to debate the two resolutions - one of them a sharply worded condemnation of India's Citizenship (Amendment) Act - it decided to postpone voting on them till March The European Parliament will now take up the resolutions for voting during the March plenary session between March 30 and April 2.
The voting, if it takes place then, will come after the India-European Union summit scheduled on March 13, which is likely to be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “A resolution slamming the Indian government on CAA could have jeopardised the summit,” a source said. Indian diplomats in Brussels, led by the country’s envoy to Belgium, Gaitri Issar Kumar, had been reaching out to the groups of Members of European Parliament (MEPs) over the last few days.
Sources in the Indian government called the postponement of voting as a “diplomatic victory” for India. The source said, “Friends of India prevailed over the Friends of Pakistan in the European Parliament today.” The source said that efforts of outgoing British MEP, Shaffaq Mohammad, to have a resolution passed by the European Parliament against India on the penultimate day before Brexit were defeated.
Shaffaq Ahmed, a Pakistan-origin British MEP, was considered one of the architects of the resolutions, although it had the support of 559 MEPs in the 751-member European Parliament. The CAA is a matter internal to India and has been adopted through a due process through democratic means. We expect that our perspectives in this matter will be understood by all objective and fair-minded MEPs,” the source in the government said.
The joint resolution by five political groups says that a process like the NRC exacerbates “climate of xenophobia” while fuelling religious intolerance and discrimination. It said the CAA is “discriminatory in nature and dangerously divisive”, and appears to undermine India’s commitment to equality before the law.
The strongly worded joint resolution was drafted by five political groups from the Centre-Right to far-Left, and had replaced the five separate resolutions by these groups. A second resolution piloted by a Eurosceptic political group backs India on the new citizenship law, but condemns the use of excessive violence.
Distancing itself from the MEPs’ move, the EU had stated that opinions expressed by the European Parliament and its members “do not represent the official position of the European Union”. The joint resolution mentions the issue of freedom of expression in India and has named some of the activists, including Akhil Gogoi and Sadaf Jafar, who had been arrested for opposing CAA and NRC.
It also warns against the “increasing nationalism which has resulted, inter alia, in fuelling of religious intolerance and discrimination against Muslims”. The second resolution, while saying that India, as a sovereign state, is “free to be the sole determinant of its legislation on who can be granted Indian citizenship”, also condemns “any excessive use of force by security forces against demonstrators protesting against the CAA”.
