Political rhetoric is not necessarily based on logic. Yet, when democratically-elected state governments declare their intent to defy a law passed by the country’s parliament, their logic cannot be passed off as mere election-time oratory, and needs to be dissected. The bold declarations by the chief ministers of three opposition-ruled states—Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal—that the recently-notified Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 will not be implemented in their states may help serve the cause of vote-bank politics; but they are impaired by the singular lack of practicality given how the law is framed—its provisions leave little room for the states to have any say in the grant of citizenship under the Act.
While the subject of “citizenship, naturalisation and aliens” already falls in the Union list according to the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, according to the provisions of the CAA Rules 2024, the District Level Committee, which verifies the documents, and the Empowered Committee, which takes the final call on citizenship, will be mostly made up of central officers with a provision for just one invitee in each from the state concerned. The chair of each committee will be a central government officer. Moreover, the quorum of each committee is two, including the chair; it means these committees can complete their task of granting or denying citizenship without involving the state representative at all.
Besides, according to Article 11 of the Constitution, it’s parliament that regulates the right of citizenship. The states are also bound to implement the laws passed by parliament. They can certainly challenge such laws, but they must do so by approaching the Supreme Court, which, as per Article 131, has the sole right to settle disputes between the different units of the Indian federation. Refusal to implement the law is not an option. Open declaration of their plan to resist would not work either. Parties issuing anti-CAA statements must understand they do not have the option of defying a law passed by both houses of parliament, even if they did not vote for it. That’s not how a democracy works. The only course of action if anyone indeed wants to block the implementation of CAA is to convince the top court of the merits of their arguments. Mere rhetoric can only serve the purpose of fooling the people for the time being.