Hindus trump Muslims in forging documents

Guwahati: With the hugely contentious NRC exposing communal fault-lines in Assam, it has emerged that more Hindus than Muslims forged documents to find their way into the National Register of Citizens, sources with close knowledge of the exercise said on Sunday.

The final NRC list, which will identify bona fide citizens of Assam, is set to be published on August 31. The exercise of updating the NRC, unique to Assam, is being conducted under the supervision of the Supreme Court.

"The interesting fact is that forgery is being committed by a very large number of doubtful Hindu applicants. In fact, more than 50 per cent of the documents that have been forged are by them," sources said.

"Now this is very, very surprising because we had the impression that only suspected illegal Muslim immigrants were indulging in wrongdoing to have their names included in the NRC. But with so many doubtful Hindus being detected, it can be assumed that a huge number of such immigrants are also present in Assam," one of the sources said.

Assam's BJP government had recently claimed that more Hindus than Muslims were excluded from the draft NRC, and placed in the state assembly a district-wise list of exclusions, ignoring an apex court directive of secrecy.

The court had said all such information be submitted to it in sealed covers.

The state government had claimed the data reflected that more people were excluded from the list in districts inhabited by indigenous people than those on the India- Bangladesh border, implying that the NRC draft was flawed as illegal Muslim immigrants were more likely to be present in the frontier districts.

When reached for comments, a senior RSS Assam region functionary and its 'Bouddhik Prachar Pramukh' Shankar Das said the updated NRC will be "wrong" and that it will be challenged.

"Nobody has given correct data. The SC is acting only as per Prateek Hajela's (the NRC State Coordinator) information.

So, we don't believe any of the leaked data till now, whether it's about Hindus or Muslims. We know that this NRC is going to be wrong and it will be challenged," he said.