New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will chair a meeting to review the security situation in the country on Thursday evening amid violent protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, officials said. Massive protests against the contentious new law that promises citizenship to immigrants from neighboring countries excluding Muslims have swept India culminating into clashes with law enforcement and crackdowns.
National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy and Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla are expected to attend the meeting. The tension in several parts of the country will be reviewed threadbare by the Home Ministry in the meeting, the officials said.
Police detained hundreds of people in Delhi, Bengaluru and several parts of India on Thursday and shut down the internet in some places as protests entered a second week over the new citizenship law that critics say undermines the country’s secular constitution.
Citing law and order concerns following violent protests against the law during the past week, authorities imposed bans against public gatherings in parts of the capital and two big states – Uttar Pradesh in the north and Karnataka in the south. Similar restrictions were also imposed in parts of Delhi and capital’s border with Haryana was sealed.
Defying the bans, protesters held rallies at Delhi’s historic Red Fort and a town hall in Bengaluru, Karnataka’s state capital, but police swept in to round up people in the vanguard of those demonstrations as they tried to get underway.
In Bengaluru, Ramchandra Guha, a respected historian and intellectual, was taken away by police along with several other professors.
