Guwahati: The much-publicised first draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was on Monday published with the names of 1.9 crore people out of the 3.29 crore total applicants in Assam recognising them as legal citizens of India. The rest of the names are under various stages of verification, Registrar General of India Sailesh said at a press conference held at midnight where he made the draft public.“This is a partial draft. It contains 1.9 crore persons, who have been verified till now. The rest of the names are under various stages of verification. As soon as the verification is done, we will come out with another draft,” he said.
NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela said those people whose names have been excluded in the first list need not worry.
“It is a tedious process to verify the names. So there is a possibility that some names within a single family may not be there in the first draft,” said Hajela.
“There is no need to panic as rest of the documents are under verification,” he said.
Asked about the possible timeframe for the next draft, the RGI said it will be decided as per the guidelines of the Supreme Court, under whose monitoring the document is being prepared — in its next hearing in April.
The entire process will be completed within 2018, Sailesh said.
The application process started in May 2015 and a total of 6.5 crore documents were received from 68.27 lakh families across Assam.
“The process of accepting complaints will start once the final draft is published as rest of the names are likely to appear in that,” Hajela said.
People can check their names in the first draft at NRC sewa kendras across Assam from 8 am. They can also check for information online and through SMS services.
The RGI informed that the groundwork for this mammoth exercise began in December 2013 and 40 hearings have taken place in the Supreme Court over the last three years.
Assam, which faced influx from Bangladesh since the early 20th century, is the only state having an NRC, first prepared in 1951.
The Indian Supreme Court, which is monitoring the entire process, had ordered that the first draft of the NRC be published by December 31 after completing the scrutiny of over two crore claims along with that of around 38 lakh people whose documents were suspect. – The Times of India
Al-Jazeera reported: The first draft of a list of citizens of the northeastern state of Assam comes after decades of debate, sometimes violent, over immigration from neighbouring Bangladesh.
The draft list, published at midnight on Sunday, will ultimately be incorporated into the National Register of Citizens (NRC) after a census carried out for the first time since 1951.
The government claims this register will be used to identify and deport illegal immigrants, but activists warn that hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Assam could be rendered stateless in the process.
“The officials [associated with the NRC project] visited many homes in our village but skipped ours. I am scared about my family being kept off the list. I am an Indian citizen. My father teaches in a school here; my grandfather has a national voter identity card too, [but I] am still petrified,” 25-year-old Hussein Ahmed Madani, who lives in the remote Baladmari Char village in lower Assam, told Al Jazeera.
“I have seen many people in my village returning from long fights in the High Court and Supreme Court, vindicated after long battles to prove their citizenship. But there is an atmosphere of fear in the village, in our community here. Who knows who will be thrown out as Bangladeshi.”
‘Hostile towards Muslims’
Since the country’s partition in 1947, Assam has been rocked by protests over “illegal immigration” from across the porous riverine border with Bangladesh, increasing sectarian tensions and riots between the state’s indigenous population and Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants.
In February 1983, more than 2,000 Bengali-speaking Muslims, allegedly illegal immigrants, were killed in Nellie in central Assam. In recent years, thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims have been thrown in detention camps in Assam as “doubtful voters” and “immigrants”.
Comprising an estimated 40 percent of the state’s population, Muslims have continued to battle the tag of “infiltrator” – and amid such strident rhetoric, many are anxious about the citizen list.
“If it’s a free and fair list, no genuine citizen’s name will be dropped. But the ones executing the list work directly or indirectly under the right-wing BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] government, which is hostile towards Muslims,” Aman Wadud, a rights lawyer in the state capital of Guwahati, told Al Jazeera.
“This is the same government which rode to power spewing venom against Muslims, alleging that 35 electoral constituencies are dominated by Bangladeshi Muslims. People are apprehensive that this government might try to manipulate the list and drop legal citizens from the updated list.”
To make the list, citizens in Assam must provide documents proving that they or their family lived in the country before March 24, 1971 – a date that accounts for the migration of people from across Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) who were fleeing persecution during the 1965 India-Pakistan conflict, but excludes those who arrived during and after the 1971 war leading to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.
Competition for jobs
Upamanyu Hazarika, who founded the Prabajan Virodhi Manch anti-immigration group, said that “outsiders” were threatening the state’s culture and cornering resources, such as land and jobs.
“By virtue of being Muslims, they become part of the larger Muslim population and their interests are legitimised, overlooking the fact that they are foreigners,” Hazarika told Al Jazeera. “Twenty to 25 percent of the state’s population are illegal immigrants; they take away our jobs, the jobs of indigenous people. They swarm to the lower Assam region in huge numbers and drive away from our indigenous tribes. We are becoming refugees in our own homelands.”
India says it has implemented a border management plan in conjunction with Bangladesh, but the Bangladeshi government has denied discussing the deportation of migrants with Indian officials. The two countries share a border of more than 4,000 kilometres.
The BJP government says there are about 20 million Bangladeshi immigrants in India, although this figure is disputed.
The release of the NRC comes after the first census in more than half a century. The BJP says it is a “nationalist project” to identify immigrants and thwart “designs of demographic change in the state”.
“Demographic changes in Assam owing to illegal immigration of Bangladeshis is alarming to the extent that many districts have become Muslim-majority areas,” BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Mittal told Al Jazeera. “This NRC register is a step towards identification and isolation of such elements.”
Wadud, however, said the state was making it very difficult for Muslims to prove their Indian citizenship.
“Indian citizens are being branded as foreigners, harassed and targeted,” Wadud said. “But this is not new. Massacres against Muslims branded as Bangladeshis in Assam are cyclic. There is a new form of segregation growing.”
