Hasina Maan Gayi
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said that she was satisfied with Prime Minister Narendra Modi assurance that her country should not be concerned over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) being implemented in Assam. Her remarks came a week after she met Modi in New York and said that the NRC has become a matter of ‘great concern’ for Bangladeshis.
But, What is the National Register of Citizens?
The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the list of Indian citizens of Assam. It was prepared in 1951, following the census of 1951. For a person’s name to be included in the updated NRC list of 2018, he/ she will have to furnish the existence of name in the legacy data and proving linkage with the person whose name appears in the legacy data. The process of NRC update was taken up in Assam as per a Supreme Court order in 2013. In order to wean out cases of illegal migration from Bangladesh and other adjoining areas, NRC updation was carried out under The Citizenship Act, 1955, and according to rules framed in the Assam Accord.
While the BJP government has been adamant on completing the NRC exercise in Assam, the Northeast states have also witnessed widespread protests against the exercise. Along with protests, the topic also created political turmoil all over India with some political leaders demanding that NRC be a nationwide exercise.
So, should NRC be a nationwide exercise?
It is imperative to update the NRC in the rest of the country as well as to ensure that these Bangladeshi Muslims do not find shelter in any other part of India. Otherwise, the ongoing exercise in Assam will be a futile one. It does not serve the larger interests of India to cleanse Assam of illegal migrants and then have them resettle in other parts of the country.
However, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee opposing the exercise alleged that NRC in Assam was done with a “political motive” to divide people and warned that it would lead to a bloodbath and a civil war in the country. Attacking the BJP, she said the saffron party is trying to divide the country and asserted that this will not be tolerated.
The final draft of NRC was published on 31 July 2018. The draft excluded 40 lakh people. While the draft created an uproar in the political circle, the Supreme Court assured that every person who wasn’t included in the list would be given a fair chance to prove their claims.
The Supreme Court set a deadline for the final list of NRC to be published on July 31, 2019. However, the date was extended to 31 August 2019.
In a surprising event, the final list of NRC published on 31 August, left 19 lakh people out of the list, almost half of the 40 lakh left out of the list in 2018.
The exclusion of 19 lakh people from NRC raised a question of scrapping the entire exercise.
So, should the NRC exercise be scrapped?
Honestly, this kind of an exercise to flush out ‘foreigners’ was always going to create trouble. We simply don’t have the infrastructure capacity to carry out NRC smoothly. There was bound to be chaos and confusion. Therefore, ideally, a more sophisticated approach was needed here. But that of course wouldn’t have been politically expedient for several sections.
However, illegal immigration is not merely a state’s problem but a serious issue for the entire nation. It is a specter that has been haunting us ever since we got Independence. There is no alternative to the NRC for the documentation of the population. In any case, both the central and the state governments have already allayed the apprehensions of those left out with the assurance that they have recourse to appeal.
That’s all there is from us this week, do check out the UnFound App on Google Play and be a #RebelAgainstMisinformation
(Contributed by Srikanth Ramakrishnan)
