Don't know about my parents' birthplace, will be the first person to go to detention centre: Ashok Gehlot
Jaipur/IBNS: Making a surprise visit to the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protest site which is billed as "Jaipur's Shaheen Bagh", Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot said he would be the first person to go to detention centre as he was unaware of his parents' birthplace, media reports said.
Delhi's Shaheen Bagh is the site where hundreds of women and men are camped for two months protesting against the CAA which aims to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi but not Muslim refugees who came to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh before 2015.
Leading the protesters to applaud him with claps, Gehlot said as quoted by NDTV, "If I am not able to furnish the details, I too would be asked to live in a detention centre. I am not aware of the birthplace of my parents. You stay assured, if such situation comes then I would be the first to go there."
The Chief Minister further said several of his counterparts in other states are against the CAA and the Centre must withdraw it.
Most of the opposition parties including Gehlot's party Congress are against the CAA along with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR).
In a U-turn from their previous positions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government never discussed NRC since 2014 when the saffron party was voted to power.
Regarding NPR, Shah recently on a television channel said, "No one will have to show papers for NPR. Just that they will have state information."
On CAA, the Home Minister said the new citizenship law was not against any Indian Muslims.
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