All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) President and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Monday welcomed the Telangana cabinet's decision to pass an Assembly resolution against the Centre's controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
"I welcome the decision taken by the Telangana government, by cabinet (on anti-CAA resolution)," the AlMIM chief told reporters in Hyderabad.
Owaisi also added that the proposed National Population Register (NPR) had nothing to do with social welfare schemes and it was purely an exercise done to undertake the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the future.
He hoped that state chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao would put on hold the National Population Register exercise just as in Kerala.
The Telangana government on Sunday took the decision on passing an Assembly resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act at a Cabinet meeting chaired by the Chief Minister, while urging the Centre to repeal last year's changes in the Citizenship Act.
The BJP meanwhile, described it as "a minority appeasement tactic". In a statement, Telangana BJP chief spokesperson K Krishna Sagar Rao described the cabinet's decision as "illegal and anti-constitutional."
"Cabinet decision (of) passing a resolution to repeal CAA is a minority appeasement tactic and it exposes the copycat decision by Chief Minister in blindly following communist and Congress ideology for electoral expediency," he said.
According to him, the state cabinet is a constitutional body and it cannot pass a resolution against a national law passed by parliament.
"Opposing, non-implementation and disregarding a national law as per Indian Constitution part 11 and articles 256 and 257 is a serious violation by state government and can even warrant a recommendation by the state Governor for president's rule by invoking Article 356," he warned.