The final NRC, for which the entire State waited with bated breath, was termed as flawed and incomplete by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). The student body that spearheaded the six-year-long Assam Movement, on Saturday said that it would move the Supreme Court seeking the removal of discrepancies in the NRC.
The AASU questioned the margin of difference between the exclusion figure in the NRC and the estimate of illegal migrants given by the Central government from time to time.
“We are not happy with the outcome of the mammoth exercise and believe that there are a lot of deficiencies in the NRC. The final exclusion figure of 19.06 lakh is nowhere near the estimate given by the Union government from time to time. At one point of time, the Union Home Minister had said that the figure was approximately 50 lakh. Different estimates were given by the Union and the State governments, but none was as low as the one, which came out in the NRC,” AASU chief adviser Samujjal Bhattacharya told the media here.
The student body also rapped the Central and State governments for not doing enough for detecting the illegal migrants in the State. “Since the State and the Union governments have failed do their bit in producing an error-free NRC, even if they design any mechanism to address the issue, it won’t be acceptable,” the AASU leaders said.
“The AASU had demanded inclusion of only ten documents for proving citizenship. But, the then State government allowed 15 documents as proof of citizenship. Section 4.3 of the Citizenship Act, which has the provision of suo motu action by the State for verification of citizenship, was also not used by the government. To top it all, the provision of objection, which was a part of the NRC, was not used by the State government at all against the doubtful names included in the draft NRC. The State government lost a golden opportunity to solve the long pending foreigners issue,” AASU general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi stated.
The student body, however, said that it had full faith in the judiciary and it would approach the Supreme Court with its grievances.
“Despite all its flaws and shortcomings, the NRC is the first and only systematic exercise undertaken on the foreigners issue in the past 40 years. The process was monitored by the Supreme Court and supervised by the Registrar General of India, and we believe that our concerns could be addressed through the same channel,” AASU president Dipanka Kumar Nath said.
