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 neighbouring 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.

Many from the film fraternity including actors Farhan Akhtar, Hrithik Roshan, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub, Parineeti Chopra, Siddharth Malhotra, veteran screenwriter Javed Akhtar, filmmakers Vishal Bhardwaj and Anurag Kashyap, and Hollywood actor John Cusack have expressed solidarity with the youth over the police crackdown inside the varsity campuses.

There have been widespread protests across India against the amended Citizenship Act.

The Citizenship Amendment Act grants Indian citizenship to refugees from minority communities fleeing religious persecution from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and who entered India on or before December 31, 2014.

The protesters claim that the legislation is "unconstitutional and divisive" as it excludes Muslims.

The Home Minister had said in Parliament that Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh declare themselves as an Islamic nation in their respective constitutions, hence a Muslim in those countries cannot be a religious minority, and thereby cannot be persecuted on religious grounds. The Citizenship Amendment Act in India covers all minorities facing religious persecution in these three nations, and is hence not a divisive law.