Immediately after being elected to power for the second time the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Assam—this time led by Himanta Biswa Sarma—has once again raised the issue of the National Register of Citizens.
The State NRC Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sharma on Thursday (May 13) filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking comprehensive time-bound re-verification of the National Register of Citizens on the plea that the NRC published in 2019 has not been completed and that the Registrar General of India has not yet issued notification.
Though the BJP is in power both in the state and at the Centre yet the saffron party in Assam has been repeatedly alleging that the NRC published in 2019 has wrongful inclusions and exclusions.
The Assam government had already moved the Supreme Court demanding 20 per cent re-verification in the districts bordering Bangladesh and 10 per cent in rest of the districts of the state.
The state Coordinator of the NRC too is claiming that fraudulent documents had been submitted in many cases, that is why many genuine names have been excluded and fake ones included.
Thus, only after the re-verification that the final notification should be issued and those who have wrongfully got their names included in the voters’ list should be excluded.
It needs to be mentioned that 19 lakh names were excluded from the NRC published in 2019. According to various estimates, almost two-thirds of them were Hindus. It was only after this that the then Sarbananda Sonowal government refused to accept the list. Now the whole process is once again going to be delayed.
