Updated: December 10, 2020 3:21:40 am
The NRC process has hit a stone wall since then and the NRC office has yet to issue refusal orders for the 19 lakh people excluded. (Archive)
CONTRARY TO THE POSITION STATED so far, Assam’s NRC (National Registry of Citizens) coordinator Hitesh Sarma told Guwahati High Court that the final NRC “has not yet been published” by the Registrar General of India ( RGI).
In a Dec. 3 affidavit in Superior Court, Sarma said the RGI was silent on the release of the “final NRC.” It called the list released on August 31, 2019, a “supplemental NRC” and said it included 4,700 ineligible names.
The Indian Express accessed a copy of the affidavit on Wednesday.
The NRC, published in August last year under the direct supervision of the Supreme Court, excluded 19 lakhs from strangers, including about 5.56 lakhs from Hindus and more than 11 lakhs from Muslims, according to state government estimates, of around 3.3 crore of applicants. In a press release, then-state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela called it the “final NRC.”
However, the Assam government maintains that the August 2019 list is wrong and blamed Hajela for creating a flawed NRC. He was moved out of state by the Supreme Court last year shortly after his relationship with the state government deteriorated.
The NRC process has hit a stone wall since then and the NRC office has yet to issue refusal orders for the 19 lakh people excluded. Only after these people receive the rejection orders can they appeal against their exclusion in the Immigration Courts.
In the affidavit, Sarma maintained that all the anomalies detected by him in the published NRC were communicated to the
RGI in February of this year. In addition, it had sought “the necessary instructions for corrective measures in the interests of an error-free NRC which is of utmost importance since the NRC is directly related to national security and integrity.” However, the RGI has not given instructions on how to deal with the anomalies, he said.
“Rather, instructions have been received for the issuance of rejection sheets and settlement of the NRC update operation. The Registrar General of India is also silent on the final publication of the NRC for which it is the sole authority to take action and to date, the Registrar General of India has not yet published the final NRC as per Clause 7 of the Citizenship rules. (Citizen registration and issuance of national identity cards) Rules of 2003, ”wrote Sarma.
The Assam government contends that the NRC published in August 2019 is wrong with unlawful inclusions and exclusions and has appealed to the Supreme Court that there must be a re-verification of the names included in the NRC: a re-verification of 20 percent of those included names in border districts and 10 percent elsewhere.
Sarma wrote that after the publication of the NRC in August 2019, some district heads of the exercise, the District Citizen Registry Registry (DRCR), had written to the then state coordinator seeking a change in the results of some people. . A total of 10,199 requests were made, of which 5,404 were to change the result from ‘Reject’ to ‘Accept’ and 4,795 were to change the result from ‘Accept’ to ‘Reject’.
Of the 4,795 requests, 1,032 were for the removal of names for belonging to the categories of Declared Foreigner (DF), Doubtful Voter (DV), people with pending cases in Foreign Courts (PFT) and the descendants of these categories. The remaining 3,763 requests were to remove names due to “other reasons.”
Sarma has already written to the head of the NRC in the districts to remove the 1,032 names in October. The action on the 3,763 names, Sarma wrote, will be “considered after further verification subject to approval by the Registrar General of India.”
“To put the verification mechanism in place, the approval of the Registrar General of India is required and if agreed, the necessary authorization of funds by the Registrar General of India will be required for such verification,” Sarma wrote.
In the affidavit, Sarma has done his best to establish how there were failures in the different steps of the NRC process with Hajela at the helm: how people were marked as ‘original inhabitants’ even though they did not enter the category; how the verification steps were not performed with due diligence; how the “integrity of some of the verifying officers was not beyond doubt”; and lack of quality controls by superior officers, among others.
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