NRC: Assam government to file fresh affidavit in Supreme Court seeking reverification

GUWAHATI: The Assam government is readying to file a fresh affidavit in the Supreme Court seeking 20% sample reverification of names included in the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the districts bordering Bangladesh and a 10% sample reverification of names in the remaining districts.
Home minister Amit Shah had discussed the NRC issue on September 20 with Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal and state finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. It was decided that the state government will file a fresh affidavit in the top court.

“We are readying the affidavit. As in earlier occasions our prayers were disallowed, we will seek review with a fresh petition,” Assam home secretary Gyanendra Dev Tripathi told ET.

Earlier, the Supreme Court has rejected the reverification plea. NRC is an exercise to weed out illegal immigrants and is monitored by the Supreme Court.

Sarma, after the meeting, had said that the state government will once again raise in the Supreme Court the issue of 20% sample reverification of names included in the draft NRC in the districts bordering Bangladesh and a 10 % sample reverification of names included in the draft NRC in the remaining districts. The Centre will support the state government’s affidavit in Supreme Court, he added.

Assam Public Works (APW), the main petitioner in the NRC case in the Supreme Court, has sought 100% reverification of the NRC. The organisation has filed eight affidavits in the court in this regard.

APW president Abhijeet Sharma told ET, “It’s more than a month since the meeting was held and what has stopped the government from filing the affidavit? This shows there are some elements within the government who do not want the affidavit to be filed. The government is not serious about filing the affidavit.”

He added, “Just before the publication of NRC in July last year, the government had filed an affidavit seeking reverification, which was rejected. It is more than a year now, the government is silent. NRC has become lip service for the government.”

Sharma said former NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela had stated in court that 27% incidental reverification was already done during the claims and objections process, and that this had led to exclusion of 102,462 names.

“If 27% reverification resulted in the exclusion of over 1 lakh names, imagine what will be the numbers if the rest 73% is reverified? There is a need for 100% reverification,” said Sharma. “This also reflects that quality of work was utterly poor. We were astonished as to how with this quality of work final NRC was allowed to be published on August 31 last year.”

Sharma said the fact that the NRC in the current form is ridden with irregularities is confirmed, as the NRC coordinator, in an order to deputy commissioners, had asked officers in different districts to verify the speaking orders, for in several cases the authorities had found anomalies. They have been asked to scrutinise the speaking orders of the disposing officers (DOs).

The final NRC list, published on August 31 last year, had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry while leaving out over 1.9 million people.

The BJP in Assam has often said that as the NRC authority refused to accept the refugee certificates issued prior to 1971, Bengali Hindu, Koch Rajbonshi and Buddhist people got excluded from NRC in large numbers.