PANAJI: Former IAS Officer Kannan Gopinathan on Tuesady alleged that government was dividing society through Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC). Delivering a talk hosted by Goa Alliance Against CAA, NRC and NPR in the city, Gopinathan said CAA was religiously discriminatory as only three neighbouring countries had been selected and hence unconstitutional. ''We need to ask the government why selection of only three countries. What is the criteria of selecting the three countries?. If it is religion, it is discriminatory. And the religion-based discrimination is unconstitutional. If the criteria is other than religion then we can debate," he said. Gopinathan alleged that entire exercise of bringing CAA and NRC in the country was hatred towards a particular community. He said the government in order to target someone was harassing others. Gopinathan said NRC was a futile exercise which resulted in getting nothing and it would meet the same future if conducted country wide. "They are dividing the society on continuous basis. What is political is becoming personal. NRC is going to create problems every where. It is simple to get documents as NCR and CAA become existential question. Changing names is not uncommon. But if it becomes bureaucratic exercise it is simply impossible to carry out," Gopinathan said. "Let’s assume there are two crore illegal immigrants in the country. If they are to be driven out where will they go? Which country will they be send to? A State like Haryana will have to be created to make them settle there," he said. Gopinathan hit out at those who had been claiming that the people protesting against the CAA were unaware about the law and had not even read it. He claimed if one had asked supportive MPs about the CAA on the day it was passed in Parliament, several of them would not have been able to speak on it as they would not have known what was passed because they were not given time to go through the amendment bill. He pointed out that earlier such legislation was passed after several rounds of consultation but now by night it becomes an Act. Now everything is a surgical strike, he quipped. He also claimed that some "RSS people" were convinced that the CAA was a bad law but were keeping quiet as the NDA government at the Centre was their own baby. The former INA officer also questioned silence of people when Article 370 was abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir. Gopinathan said that if NRC was conducted across the country, poor, tribals and nomads would be affected the most in the country.