Shaheen Bagh protesters want Amit Shah to engage them collectively

Feb 16

New Delhi: Shaheen Bagh protesters are willing to meet Home Minister Amit Shah but they want this dialogue to be a mass affair, not a meeting with a delegation of a few of them.

”Let him address us collectively. It should be a public, open address, and that is why we today proceeded towards his office en masse, but were stopped by police,” one of the leading figures of the Shaheen Bagh agitation Shahnawaz Khan said.

He stressed that the issue involved was very serious and a matter of life and death for crores, especially the weak and poor, who stand to lose their citizenship for lack of proof.

”You are saying that additional two hours of your school children and office-goers were being wasted, but here the whole lives would go waste once they were declared stateless,” he said when asked whether they planned to lift the blockade.

He said the agitation will not be called off unless they got an assurance that the NRC will not be implemented.

”The protest in Shaheen Bagh has inspired people not only across the country but across the world to stand up to oppose the unjust CAA and the proposed NRC,” Shahnawaz said.

It is over two months now since women in Shahheen Bagh and Jamia students launched their agitation against the CAA, which was passed by Parliament in December last, and the proposed NRC. The citizenship law proposes to grant citizenship to minorities coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It excludes Muslims.
–India News Stream