Wait for finality to NRC gets longer
The Indian Supreme Court's decision on July 23 to extend by one month (from July 31 to August 31) the deadline for publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam was quite expected. The new component in the court order was the rejection of the pleas of the federal Indian government and the Assam state authorities for sample re-verification of 20 percent of the names included in the NRC in districts bordering Bangladesh, and ten percent in the remaining districts.
What was common among the federal Indian government and Assam authorities, as also NRC Coordinator Prateek Hajela, was the request for timeline extension. But their reasons varied. Hajela cited the prevailing flood situation in large parts of Assam and wanted more time to complete the apex court-mandated and supervised exercise of updating the 1951 NRC. But he was not on the same page with the federal and state governments, which joined hands in demanding permission from the Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice RF Nariman for the sample re-verification exercise to set right the "wrongful inclusions and exclusions" of names during the NRC updating.
To press their request before the top court for re-verification, Attorney General KK Venugopal contended that the names of several illegal immigrants have been included in the NRC. Similarly, India's Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who represented Assam government in the matter, attributed the inclusions to local influence and suggested NRC officials might have been hesitant to delete their names from the list. Both the federal and Assam governments have argued that India "cannot be the refugee capital of the world." Venugopal also drew the apex court's attention to the fact that the court, in its order in August 2018, had favoured a re-verification of ten percent of the names. He said that since there "was some variance" in enumeration in Assam's districts bordering Bangladesh, a re-verification exercise would set doubts at rest.
The federal and Assam governments were so keen on the sample re-verification of at least 20 percent of the names in districts bordering Bangladesh and ten percent in other districts that they had even agreed to scale down their demand to at least five percent re-verification, which they argued could be done within the one-month extension of the deadline for final NRC publication.
During the previous hearing in the case last week, the Assam government had told the apex court that it received several complaints about the alleged connivance of local-level NRC officials conducting the NRC updating exercise to include and exclude the names, and hence its demand for sample re-check. But the NRC Coordinator did not agree and said these officials were not drawn from local areas. In its July 10 report to the Supreme Court, the Coordinator said that 27 percent re-verification of names, which translates to 80 lakh in real terms, had taken place in the process of deciding on the claims for inclusion in the final NRC and objections to those claims.
The top court bench finally went along with the NRC Coordinator and rejected the federal and Assam governments' re-verification demand. "The court does not feel the need for re-verification of the draft NRC. We are more than satisfied with the work done in the state," the bench observed on July 23.
Hajela has told the apex court that the public engagement for settling the claims and objections to inclusion of names is nearing its end, and a supplementary list of names with additional inclusions and exclusions would be published on July 31. At the end of filing of claims and objections as on December 31 last year, about 36.2 lakh claims for inclusion and nearly two lakh objections were filed.
The apex court has also fixed August 7 for hearing on another contentious issue related to the NRC: whether or not to allow inclusion of a person in the NRC if the name of none of his or her parents figures in the category of doubtful voter or declared foreigner. The final draft NRC, made public on July 30 last year, had 28,963,877 names and left out a little more than four million people. Another one lakh names were deleted recently during the adjudication of claims and objections.
The NRC updating exercise began six years ago as a fall-out of the 1985 Assam Accord, hammered out to end years of violent agitation against illegal immigrants in the state, with the objective of identifying and deporting the immigrants who came to Assam between January 1966 and March 24, 1971. According to the Assam Accord, the voting rights of those who entered the state between January 1966 and March 1971 would be put on hold for ten years and those who came after March 1971 would be deported.
The NRC is being updated to include those who can prove that they or their ancestors were in Assam before March 25, 1971. What is noteworthy is that this is the date when the Pakistan army's "Operation Searchlight" began in Bangladesh, triggering the liberation war after which millions of people took shelter in different Indian states, particularly in border states.
What emerges from the contentions of the Indian and Assam governments is that the NRC is far from being flawed and that the process of updating may have been marred by irregularities and corruption. But then these irregularities are perhaps not entirely unexpected primarily because of two reasons: one, the exercise is very large, and two, it is heavily dependent on the bureaucratic machinery. Thirdly, it has also been argued by the authorities in the apex court that many genuine inhabitants of Assam remained outside the NRC because they did not have adequate documents to prove their places of birth or legacy papers. This, too, is not surprising in a country that has not had a traditionally documentation culture. One of the main reasons for India to introduce the multi-purpose Aadhar identity card is precisely to end the absence of documentation habit. The question is: are these shortcomings big enough to mar the entire NRC updating project?
On July 17, Home Minister Amit Shah told the Rajya Sabha that the government would identify illegal immigrants and deport them as per international law. The illegal immigrants and the NRC issues figured in the Bharatiya Janata Party's manifesto for the recent parliamentary polls and the Indian President's speech to the budget session of the current parliament.
There are reports that Shah is likely to flag the issue of illegal immigrants during his proposed meeting with Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan in New Delhi on August 7. Ahead of the Shah-Khan meeting, the Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha on July 23 that 10,746 infiltrators were intercepted in the last five and a half years from January 2014, along India's border with Bangladesh, an overwhelming majority of them being in West Bengal.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent for The Daily Star.