MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th December, 2019) Young lawyers across India, who monitor the large scale protests against the adoption of amendments to the controversial law on citizenship in the country via social media, have decided to step in the demonstrations to provide legal aid and representation to those who were detained by police officers, the India Today magazine reported on Wednesday.
According to the recent media reports, several hundreds of people have been arrested during the demonstrations since they erupted in early December.
The magazine reported that one of the most active lawyers' networks was in the capital city of New Delhi as, after the December 18 protests in the city, lawyers addressed courts to get legal aid for detainees in the middle of the night.
"We have been part of the protests using social media. Seen how the protesters are being detained. No senior official is willing to speak to us. More than 50 lawyers in Delhi have come together. Now, it is spreading to other states," one of the lawyers said, as quoted by India Today.
The ongoing nationwide protests in India are a result of parliament passing last week's bill, which allowed citizenship for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis facing persecution in neighboring countries. Muslims were excluded from the right to citizenship under the bill, with the exception seen as a fresh discriminatory attempt to sideline the nearly 200-million-strong Muslim community.
The law angered the Indian Muslim community, which believes that it violates the constitution, as it oppresses a group of citizens in a formally secular country on religious grounds. The residents of the country's northeastern states fear that now millions of people from Bangladesh could legally settle in their regions, which could threaten the interests of the local population.
On December 18, the Indian Supreme Court refused to suspend the implementation of the citizenship law as amended, despite the ongoing unrest in the country.
