The final National Register of Citizens (NRC) list in Assam was published on Saturday including names of 3.1 crore people and leaving out 19 lakh names.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has decided to move the Supreme Court to re-verify select data on the final list of the National Register of Citizens in Assam. (File Photo: IANS)
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to move the Supreme Court to re-verify select data on the final list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam as the party feels that there’s enough room for errors.
According to Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam Finance Minister often referred to as the Amit Shah of northeast, the party would move the apex asking for a re-verification of 20 per cent of the sample data in the districts bordering Bangladesh and 10 per cent of samples from the main land of Assam against the draft NRC.
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The draft NRC gave BJP a surprise when many from the border districts, where the population is dense, made it to the list. It was presumed that majority of them were illegal Bangladeshis. Sarma thinks that the list is a “mixed bag” with “technical flaws” in the process of making the data that may have caused exclusion of Bengali Hindu refugees who had crossed over to Assam before 1971.
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Sarma said, “We have lost hope in the present form of the NRC right after the draft. When so many genuine Indians are left out, how can you claim that this document is a red letter for the Assamese society?”
Assam BJP president Ranjeet Kumar Dass has also expressed his discontent over the final NRC list. The spat between the BJP and Prateek Hajela, the chief coordinator of the NRC, has come out in the open.
The final National Register of Citizens (NRC) list in Assam was published on Saturday including names of 3.1 crore people and leaving out 19 lakh names where many Bengali Hindu refugees who had come to Assam before 1971, or people who couldn’t furnish enough documents were also left out.
The update process of NRC started in 2013 when the Supreme Court of India passed orders for its update. Since then, the apex court bench of Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R Fali Nariman has been monitoring it continuously.
The entire project is headed by the State Coordinator of National Registration, Assam, Prateek Hajela under the strict monitoring of the Supreme Court. A 120-day appeal window has been given to those who want to dispute their exclusion from the list.
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