Two persons, including a woman, in Assam have been granted Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, PTI reported.

With this, four persons have received citizenship in Assam under the Act, their lawyer Dharmananda Deb said.

This was the first time that a woman was given citizenship under the Act in the state, Deb was quoted by the news agency as saying.

“The 40-year-old woman had entered India from Bangladesh in 2007 and had been living in Sribhumi, while the 61-year-old man, who came to the country in 1975, had been living in Cachar,” Deb said.

The Union home ministry granted them citizenship on December 12. Their citizenship will be deemed to be effective from the dates when they entered India, the lawyer said.

The woman hails from the Chittagong district in Bangladesh, and had come to Silchar to accompany a relative for medical treatment, Northeast News reported. Subsequently, she met a man from Sribhumi in Assam, and married him.

The second individual who was granted citizenship hails from Bangladesh’s Moulvibazar district. He came to India at the age of 11 years, and subsequently a woman from Silchar, PTI reported.

The Citizenship Amendment Act seeks to provide a fast track to citizenship to refugees from six minority religious communities, except Muslims, from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the condition that they have lived in India for six years and have entered the country by December 31, 2014.

The law had sparked massive protests across the country in 2019 and 2020.

Many Indian Muslims fear that the law could be used, along with the nationwide National Register of Citizens, to harass and disenfranchise them. The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to identify undocumented immigrants.