The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Centre and the state government to transfer Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) Coordinator Prateek Hajela to Madhya Pradesh for the maximum period. The direction comes apparently on account of threat perceptions to Hajela. A special bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices S.A. Bobde and R.F. Nariman ordered inter-cadre transfer of Hajela on deputation.
Two FIRs were earlier lodged against Hajela for "discrepancies" in the final updated NRC list.
A lawyer and an indigenous Muslim students organisation All Assam Goriya-Moriya Yuva Chatra Parishad (AAGMYCP filed separate FIRs against Hajela in Dibrugarh and Guwahati.
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Chandan Mazumdar, whose name does not figure in the final NRC list, filed the complaint against Hajela at Dibrugarh police station on Wednesday, police said. The FIR held Hajela responsible for "discrepancies", as he was tasked with supervising the NRC updation exercise in Assam.
Another complaint was lodged against the state coordinator at Guwahati's Latasil police station on Tuesday by the AAGMYCP, claiming "deliberate" anomalies in the final list.
Hajela was instrumental in designing and implementing the unique and elaborate methodology involved in the NRC update. The objective of the methodology was to ascertain the genuineness of claims, in which applicants claimed to be descendants of people whose names figured in the 1951 NRC, or in pre-1971 electoral rolls. (The 1985 Assam Accord had set the cut-off date for detecting and deporting illegal migrants as March 24, 1971.)
He devised the family-tree verification process, under which an applicant was required to submit a detailed line of descent that proved his or her relation to a legacy person—one who had an established proof of residence in Assam before 1971. The applications were manually collected and checked, and then fed into a software that prepared a computerised family tree. In case of a mismatch between a manual submission and the computerised family tree, an investigating officer would be assigned to ascertain facts. The findings of the officer would then be vetted by higher-level officials authorised by a district magistrate.
-Inputs from PTI, Namrata Biji Ahuja
