Government working on legal status of people facing NRC exclusion

  • | Saturday | 14th July, 2018

These people will have the opportunity to file objections before the final NRC is published after four months. "It is these tribunals which, based on NRC data, will decide if a person is a citizen or a foreigner. Problems will arise if these people apply for a job, a passport or even a driving license during this period. But, what will be their citizenship status for this period of four months? The exercise of updating the NRC, that started a couple of years ago, will be the first attempt of its kind to identify the exact number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

GUWAHATI: With just seventeen days to go before the the complete draft of the National Register of Citizens ( NRC ) is published, the Assam government is trying to ascertain the legal citizenship status of an estimated 4.3 lakh people, whose names are unlikely to be included for various reasons.Around 1.80 lakh people, whose citizenship cases are lying pending in tribunals, are unlikely to be included in the complete draft. Another 1.20 lakh people, who have been tagged as 'D' or doubtful voters by the Election Commission of India and have been barred from voting, will also be excluded. There is another separate category, comprising 1.3 lakh people, whose names were erroneously included in the first NRC draft and will be left out this time.The first NRC draft included names of 1.90 crore people out of the 3.29 crore who had applied.A state cabinet sub-committee headed by finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma will meet on July 23 to finalise the legal status of these people before the Supreme Court's extended deadline for publishing the complete NRC draft on July 30.Sarma told TOI, "Once the complete draft NRC is published on July 30, some serious issues will crop up before the state government about the legal status of persons whose names will not be included. These people will have the opportunity to file objections before the final NRC is published after four months. But, what will be their citizenship status for this period of four months? Problems will arise if these people apply for a job, a passport or even a driving license during this period."Sarma added that there are two options for the government to solve this crisis. "We can either decide to maintain status quo on their citizenship status till the final NRC is published or we can put on hold the issuing of any government documents to them until the publication of the final NRC," Sarma said.He further pointed out that people who do not find their names even in the final NRC can still go to the foreigners' tribunals for redressal of their grievances. "It is these tribunals which, based on NRC data, will decide if a person is a citizen or a foreigner. Once a person is declared a foreigner, then issues of deporting them will come later but the tribunals have to give their verdict first," Sarma added.The NRC of 1951 is being updated in the state with March 25, 1971 having been decided as the cut-off date according to the Assam Accord of 1985. The accord was signed between the Centre and the state government at the end of a six-year long anti-foreigners' movement spearheaded by the All Assam Students' Union and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad. The exercise of updating the NRC, that started a couple of years ago, will be the first attempt of its kind to identify the exact number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

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