The first BJP chief minister of Assam Sarbananda Sonowal is apprehensive of law and order trouble once the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) is published on December 31, as per the directions of the Supreme Court. This has prompted the Union home ministry to swing into action to explain that the draft first list isn’t the final one and many more milestones have to be crossed before a final draft will be ready of state citizens.
The exercise covering 3.28 crore people has caused fear among the people as many names are making it to the negative list.
After the final list comes out mid-year, claims and objections are settled, disenfranchisement or taking away right to vote of non-Indian citizens in Assam will be the first step, sources said. Once a person is declared as a non-citizen, automatically he/she loses all rights that are exclusively enjoyed by citizens. But this does not mean that he/she will be thrown out immediately. Such a person can go into appeal, and exhaust all legal remedies. All procedures will be followed on a case to case basis, a government officials said.
Those persons who do not make it the citizenship register will have the option of appealing in the foreigners tribunal. But the real headache comes when he or she has exhausted all legal remedies and is declared as a non-citizen and will have to be deported. Here lies the catch.
If our friendly neighbour Bangladesh is not convinced that the person is a Bangladeshi citizen, and that person is unable to provide any details to draw a family connection there, that person faces the imminent danger of being homeless. This is exactly where the fear lies in updating of the 1951 NRC records.
The NRC update was one of the key demands related to the Assam Accord of 1985 which said , "foreigners who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971 shall continue to be detected and expelled in accordance with the law.''
The midnight of March 24, 1971 is the cut off date to declare who is an Indian citizen in Assam and who is a foreigner who entered the state later. The significance of March 25, 1971 is when the Bangladesh Liberation War began leading to a heavy influx of migrants.
While the process of updating the records began during the UPA tenure, it has been given primacy and urgency by the BJP government which wants to crack down on the problem of illegal Bangladeshi migrants. The issue figured prominently in the electoral promises of the BJP in Assam.
For now, home ministry sources said the names that do not appear in the first draft are not the names rejected. It is only a list of people whose verification has been completed. Once the process of verification of more names is completed, there will be a second list and a third draft list before a final draft list that is likely to come out in the month of March.
The ministry hopes to complete the final procedure of updating of NRC by July.
“This is an inclusion process; not a process of declaring a person foreigner. The process is still going on and verification will continue till the final list is prepared ,” said an MHA official.
Meanwhile, the security situation is being reviewed regularly by home ministry and the state government even as central forces already stationed there will be made available for possible law and order issues.
It may be recalled that soon after taking oath as chief minister, Sonowal visited to the office of the coordinator of National Register of Citizen (NRC) in the state. He had called for the fast tracking of updating of the NRC database.
All you need to know about NRC
* National Register of Citizens, 1951, is a register prepared after the conduct of the Census of 1951 in respect of each village , showing the houses or holdings, in a serial order and indicating against each house or holding the number and names of persons staying therein
* Updating of NRC involves a process of enlisting the names of those persons (or their descendants) whose names appear in any of the electoral rolls upto 1971, 1951 NRC or any of the admissible documents stipulated
* Field verification: Field verification teams are formed in each district for verification of NRC applicants house to house. The verification forms were recorded in a form called the Verification Teams report
* Office verification: In this process the supporting documents submitted by the NRC applicants are being sent to the issuing authorities electronically for back end verification. Documents are also verified locally. Documents that belong to other states were being sent to the chief secretaries for verification at their end
* After the compilation of both field and office verification results the combined Verification Report is done
*After this comes the stage of publication of the Draft NRC
