I shall now come to article 5A. It is this article that has been occupying the attention of the Members since yesterday. It has been criticised on the ground that its provisions are Undesirably wide and that it throws open the door of citizenship to people who have no moral right to be regarded as Indian citizens. I do. not personally agree with the critics of this article. Let us consider calmly what article 5A lays down and the circumstances that require that such an article should form part of our Constitution. Article 5A and article 5AA contain extraordinary provisions arising out of the present extra-ordinary circumstances, arising out of the extraordinary situation created by the partition of India. You will find no counterpart to them in the Constitution of any other country. We have to define clearly the position of those persons who had to leave Pakistan for some reason or other after the partition of India or about that time. There is such a large number of such persons here that their position had to be taken fully into consideration. The representatives of these people have made every effort to get these people recognised as citizens of India from the very start, without being required to fulfil any conditions. The Draft Constitution provided that people coming from outside India should get themselves registered as Indian citizens and that, in order to prove their domicile, they should show that they had been resident in India for a month before their registration. But these conditions were not acceptable to the representatives of the refugees. They wanted that these people should unconditionally be regarded as Indian citizens. Consequently, it has been laid down in article 5C that all those people who migrated to India permanently leaving their homes in Pakistan up to the 19th July 1948 will, without complying with any condition, be citizens of India, if they have been residing here since their migration.
