While the issue agitated students, and some opposition parties and Muslims in eastern Bihar came out against the new Citizenship Amendment Act, state chief Nitish Kumar remained silent on it, annoying his party's supporters. Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) or JDU has a huge support-base among Muslims, but he has a political tie-up with the federal ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). JDU had supported the legislation in parliament.
Angry anti-Citizenship Law activists put up life-size posters of Nitish Kumar across the capital city of Patna, with captions “Missing”, reports news agency ANI.
The posters read, “deaf, dumb, mute man is missing. Bihar state shall be grateful for locating the man”. While another read “Carefully recognise the man, neither has he been seen or heard for the past few days. #MumOverCAB_NRC”.
In the viral video, a large number of people gathered and raised “Azadi” freedom slogans as a protest to the Citizenship Law, which was being addressed by a former President of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University students' body, Kanhaiya Kumar.
Students of Patna University, who hit the streets on Sunday 15 December to protest the new law, turned violent and raised slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar. The protesters alleged that the law “targeted Muslims” and demanded its roll back.
The pictures are going viral, with social media users joining the fray to troll the chief minister.
Some Twitterati even mocked him for getting porn banned instead. Kumar had written to Prime Minister Modi on Monday to ban all "porn sites and inappropriate content" available online, which he claimed influenced criminal mentality.
Protests over the new Citizenship Law initially began in the northeastern part of the country, but spread like wildfire, as students at leading universities joined in the agitations. In Delhi, a protest by students of Jamia Millia Islamia on Sunday turned violent, with over hundred students and policemen injured in the resulting clashes.
The law enacted last week grants citizenship to illegal immigrants from six religious minorities – Hindus, Parsis, Jains, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan if they arrived in India prior to 2015, but explicitly excludes Muslims with the same circumstances.