I really don't have a dog in the race.
From the TV debate shows and the Parliament speeches I have seen, the following is my observation.
Bill crafted/ Acts Amended to protect refugees and create a path to Naturalization/Citizenship is not againt Article 14,
CAA doesn't claim one religion is superior to others (doesn't infringe equality), it rather does two things with simplicity:
1> Classification of the groups that have established the precedence of Religious persecution. This is an intelligible differentia that is specific to Islamic countries in the Indian subcontinent. i.e the groups specified are different from the professed state religion of these countries.
2>The Differential that is set by the classification of the groups is to identify the refugees who fled their home country to escape persecution, thus the classification is directly related to the objective of providing status relief to refugees in India.
CAA was aimed to alleviate citizenship requests for individuals who were victims of religious persecution. That is the scope, not Sectarian persecution (Shia, Ahmadi), Political Persecution (Sindhi, Baloch, Kashmiri, Hazara); For such cases the existing frame work for political asylum is still available to these cases.
The only place I see the SC striking down the bill is exclusion of Atheists as a classification group which faces the biggest challenge of the death penalty especially in Pakistan due to its Blasphemy Laws.
Now coming to NRC:
2019 election turnout by EC's own records about 900 million people were eligible to vote, i.e around 900 million people are above the age of 18. My assumption is there should be no problem in establishing their names in the national NRC, especially for the ones who have a PAN card, Aadhar Card, Passport, Voter Id, birth certificate, domicile cert, school LC, etc. I would suggest the government to conduct the NRC on similar lines to KYC for banks and brokerages.
