Dimapur, Dec. 14 (EMN): Lok Sabha Member of Parliament from Nagaland, Tokheho Yepthomi has maintained that his voting in favour of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (now Act) was not a unilateral decision but under directives from the NDPP president and leaders.
“My duty as MP from Nagaland is to serve in the interest of our state and with assurance given to us by Home Minister to exempt Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland from the purview of CAB (sic), I supported the bill in Parliament,” he said in a statement issued on Saturday.
According to him, while the Northeast states should all stand by one another, “we have to understand the genesis for protests in Assam and their internal state dynamics”.
Yepthomi pointed out that the CAA passed by the Parliament recently was amended to give protection to states under the Sixth Schedule and Bengal Eastern Frontier Act 1873. “Meghalaya does not have ILP and this is the reason for protest in the state. The chief minister of Meghalaya met the Home Minister on the December 13 evening for implementing ILP in his state and they are going to convene a special one-day Assembly session to pass a bill to cover the entire state under ILP.
“Manipur has also been brought under the ambit of ILP to exclude it from CAA. The exclusion of various states from CAA has been possible because of coordination of MPs from Northeast and we will continue to do so. It is also the practice in Parliament that members are given time to speak according to the numeric representation of a party. As most members from northeast are lone representatives, we are only given three minutes each to speak, thus limiting our time to speak on issues,” read the statement.
For Nagaland, he said, the onus was on the people to safeguard the land in the aftermath of the state government extending the ILP regime to Dimapur. “There is hue and cry about unemployment in our state and how immigrants are draining our economy, but what is the cause for immigrants to come to our state? It is because we ‘allow/permit’ them to do so because we do not do the works that they are doing.
“The notion of millions waiting at the Bangladesh border once the bill is passed is an absolute fallacy because the CAA is to give Indian citizenship to people who already reside in various parts of India and NOT for new immigrants from Bangladesh. Immigrants can only settle in our lands when and only they are given a Permanent Resident Certificate by village councils and municipal authorities, so why the fear of being overrun by people who are already living in some part of our country,” he stated.