West Bengal BJP divided over CAA : Info on NPR voluntary: Centre

New Delhi : Amidst strong Opposition by some non-Bharatiya Janata Party ruled states, the Centre on Tuesday made it clear that the disclosure of information in the National Population Register (NPR) exercise is not mandatory but voluntary.

Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy also said the NPR was first initiated by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2010 and it was a constitutional obligation. "Disclosure of information in NPR is voluntary only," he told reporters.

Reddy said since NPR is a constitutional obligation, the state governments should not oppose it. The Ministers also said the central government will keep sensitising the state governments about various aspects of the NPR.

The NPR exercise will be carried out along with the house listing phase of the Census 2021 from April 1 to September 30, 2020. Attacking the opposition for "misleading" people on the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said the law will not be scrapped despite the protests over it.

Going totally against the party line, BJP's West Bengal unit vice president and revolutionary hero Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's grand nephew Chandra K. Bose has called for bringing Muslims within the ambit of the CAA, and said that a legislation cannot be implemented through threats and intimidation.

Bose, who has been articulating his dissenting views for quite some time, also disapproved of the abusive language being used by the BJP leaders like its state unit president Dilip Ghosh.

"The movement which is going on across India can be resolved very easily if you clearly announce that everybody -- Hindus, Muslim, Sikhs and Christians -- will get citizenship as a result of the CAA," said Bose, who contested but lost the Lok Sabha polls last year from the Kolkata South constituency.

Daughters of renowned poet booked

Lucknow: The daughters of renowned Urdu poet Munawwar Rana are among the 160 women booked by the police for allegedly defying prohibitory orders and taking part in the protests against CAA and NRC here, officials said on Tuesday.

The protests at the historical Clock Tower in the old Lucknow area against Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens (NRC) started on Friday and have continued with hundreds of women braving the chilly conditions to take part in it.

The district administration, which imposed prohibitory orders, has booked 160 women, including two daughters of Rana, for defying the orders on Monday night. "Prohibitory orders are in force. Yet women have been staging protests.

This amounts to defying the orders and three cases have been lodged at the Thakurganj police station in this connection," Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (West Zone), Vikas Chand Tripathi said.

Fauzia and Sumaiya, daughters of Rana, have been named in one of the FIRs, he said.

Besides the Clock Tower, where protests have been going on for the past five days on the lines of Delhi''s Shaheen Bagh, another protest by women was staged in Ujariaon area of Gomti Nagar on Monday evening against the CAA and the NRC.

`1 crore defamation notice

Two women who have been protesting for over a month at Shaheen Bagh against CAA, have sent a legal notice for defamation to BJP's IT Cell head Amit Malviya for claiming protesters were accepting money in exchange for showing up.

The notice follows viral allegations made by Malviya regarding the protesters at Shaheen Bagh being paid by the Congress. On January 15, Malviya shared a "sting' video on Twitter which allegedly framed the protesters as bribe-takers.

The unidentified man in the video claimed that the women were receiving Rs 500 to 1,200 per day to sit in and were even being provided food and other incentives.

For over a month, the women and children of Shaheen Bagh-Kalindi Kunj area have been sitting in continuous day-night protest against the freshly implemented CAA.

The protests recently came under attack by the police and supporters of the BJP government who claimed the peaceful protest was causing traffic congestion.

In Lucknow, Tina Yadav, the 14-year-old daughter of Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, was seen participating in an anti-CAA rally a few days back.

Tina reached the Clock Tower, where hundreds of women were sitting on protest against the citizenship laws, and spent time talking to the women.

She was accompanied by her friends. Since she is still not a well known celebrity, no one noticed her presence. It is only when her photo went viral on Tuesday that the matter came to light.

JD(U)-BJP tie-up in Delhi questioned

Janata Dal-United leader Pavan Varma sought ideological clarity from party president Nitish Kumar over aligning with the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Delhi elections, referring to the Bihar chief minister's "private apprehensions" on how the saffron party is leading the country.

In remarks that may embarrass Kumar, Varma claimed in a letter to him that despite his alliance with the BJP in 2017, his "private apprehensions" regarding the party and how it was leading India into a "dangerous space" did not change.

"I remember your confessing to me in private how the current leadership in the BJP party has humiliated you. You maintained, on more than one occasion, that the BJP is leading India into a 'dangerous space," the former Rajya Sabha member and JD-U general secretary wrote.

He said, "It was your personal view, as conveyed to me, that the BJP is destroying institutions, and that there is a need for democratic and socialist forces within the country to regroup, a task for which you actually assigned a senior party official."

The JD-U or its president have not reacted to Varma's claims and swipe at Kumar, who has been a frequent critic of the Modi government's policies and had asked his party to stand against its citizenship measures.

The JD-U's decision to broaden its alliance outside and join hands with the BJP for the Delhi polls has left him "deeply perplexed", Varma said, adding that he looked to Kumar for ideological clarity.