The new Citizen Amendment Act which is causing many protests in India is so trending that, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft had a comment on that. The topmost executive of Microsoft criticized the law for being restrictive and bad. This led him to face many critical comments on Twitter.
The Citizen Amendment Act was passed in December last year and was effective from January this year. It’s set up for amending the current citizenship law of 1955 and to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist and Christan. The list considers most of the people (religious) fled from other nations to India except Muslim, which activists found discriminating and protesting ever since it was introduced.
Criticizing And Defending
When Ben Smith, editor of BuzzFeed asked Satya about his views on the CAA act, he said
“I think what is happening is sad. It’s just bad. I think, if anything, I would love to see a Bangladeshi immigrant who comes to India and creates the next unicorn in India or becomes the CEO of Infosys. That should be the aspiration. If I had to sort of mirror what happened to me in the US, I hope that’s what happens in India.”
Further, Satya goes defensive calling national security should be considered, and the immigration is an issue of every country, but the approach one takes to deal with it, should be sensible. And finally, he concludes being determined about what he stood for.
Right after this, Microsoft India posted Nadella’s words on its Twitter handle as,
“I’m shaped by my Indian heritage, growing up in a multicultural India and my immigrant experience in the United States. My hope is for an India where an immigrant can aspire to found a prosperous start-up or lead a multinational corporation benefitting Indian society and the economy at large.”
Reactions
BJP MP, Meenakshi Lekhi was one of the against commenters calling Nadella as, “Perfect example of How a literate needs to be educated.” In return, she asked Nadella as, “How about granting these opportunities to Syrian Muslims instead of Yezidis in the USA?”. While this being aside, author Ramachandra Guha and reporters as Pranay Roy, Sadanand Dhume etc appreciated his stance.
Ever since the bill was enacted, people of all kinds including students, authors, opposition parties etc are accused of the law of being discriminating against Muslims considering them as second class people. There were few instances of people quoting Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi to be anti-muslim and turning the country authoritative with his party, BJP.
