New Delhi: For the first time ever, the government has revealed details by religion from the state’s National Register of Citizens or NRC, conducted under the orders of the Supreme Court, and published on August 31, 2019.
Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, said that of the 16 lakh names excluded from the final draft of NRC, there were seven lakh Muslims. He said there were five lakh Bengali Hindus, two lakh Assamese Hindus (caste Axomiya and Koch-Rajbongshi) and 1.5 lakh Gorkhas on the list. He did not reveal who the remaining 3.5 lakh persons were, as per Scroll.
The chief minister has made claims on numbers that he thinks will apply for Indian citizenship under fresh rules issued for the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently. He is reported as telling News Live, a local TV channel, that only “3 to 6 lakh people will apply with CAA and not 20, 18 or 15 lakhs or 1.5 crores, which some people are claiming.”
CAA “fiasco”, says Sarma
Sarma is battling growing resentment over CAA rules in Assam. Opposition and other civil society groups are annoyed over what they think would be an attack on indigenous culture of Assam if the law to fast-track citizenship of “persecuted” non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan was to be implemented. The amended law was passed in December 2019, and led to severe protests and outrage in Assam at the time.
Sarma went so far as to speculate that the Act would be a “fiasco” in Assam, and it would see the lowest numbers applying for Indian citizenship.
“In my opinion, 3 to 6 lakh people will apply with CAA and not 20, 18 or 15 lakhs or 1.5 crores, which some people are claiming. It can be 10% more or less but not more than 6 lakhs,” he said.
He is cited as telling the channel, “the CAA rules were announced last week and by April 19, we’ll have around 40 days. This will be enough time to understand the actual scenario. 13 Hindu families in Gujarat have already been granted citizenship with CAA but in Assam, not many people have applied till now.”
He said that many families, especially Hindu Bengalis, entered Assam from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971, the cut-off date for being entitled to get Indian citizenship, adding that some of them returned as well. “Many of these families were denied ration cards by the authorities at that time, so they only had one document, the refugee registration cards issued by border authorities. But Prateek Hajela (former state coordinator of NRC) didn’t allow these cards in the NRC updation process, due to this, many names were excluded,” as per Sarma.
Last year, the Assam government went after Prateek Hajela, a resident of Madhya Pradesh and an IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, and he is set to face a probe over alleged irregularities committed while updating the register that was aimed to detect undocumented persons who could be present in Assam. Hajela was appointed the NRC coordinator by the Supreme Court in 2019 to oversee the entire exercise of the NRC.
