Rajya Sabha adjourned for the day, fate of CAB uncertain

February 12: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh was likely to table the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

It’s the penultimate day of the Budget session of Parliament. Initially, the House was adjourned till 2pm following an uproar by Samajwadi Party members after party chief Akhilesh Yadav was allegedly stopped at Lucknow airport while on his way to Allahabad.

However, when the Rajya Sabha resumed at 2 PM today, sloganeering by Samajwadi Party members continued. As a result, Rajya Sabha was again adjourned till 2.36 PM. It is expected that Rajnath Singh will table the CAB when the Rajya Sabha resumes the session at 2.36 pm today. But finally when uproar by the opposition parties continued when the house met at 2.36 PM, it was adjourned for the day. Rajya Sabha will now resume at 11 AM on Wednesday.

The states in the northeast including Meghalaya, Assam, Mizoram and Manipur, have been seeing wide scale protests ever since the controversial Bill was introduced and passed in Lok Sabha in January. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 will amend the laws governing citizenship, formed in 1955, to grant Indian nationality to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, who fled religious persecution from the three neighbouring countries and entered India before December 31, 2014.