NRC leaves 19 lakh Stateless

Guwahati: Over 19 lakh people in Assam were left out of the much-awaited final list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) released on a rain-soaked Saturday morning amid heightened security.

Some 19,06,657 people have been excluded from the final list, which names 3,11,21,004 people as Indian citizens, the NRC authorities announced. The Union Home Ministry said the 19,06,657 people left out had not submitted their claims.

The citizens' registry was released online around 10 am, ending six years of speculation over the mammoth exercise involving 52,000 state government officials working on it for identifying illegal foreigners living in Assam.

Even after the publication of the final list of the updated National Register of Citizens, a few things will continue to haunt the country. What happens to the lakhs of people who have not found their names in the final draft?

Many poor illiterate women, who have never voted in their parents' homes before being married off to faraway places, committed suicide because they could not find papers to support their claim.

While men often think that their own identity will always be the identity of their wives, this generalisation did not hold much water for the apex court when the fate of many poor illiterate women was involved!

Even men who are neither illiterate nor poor but who could not find the required documents are at the risk of being rendered stateless.

In the run up to Saturday, prohibitory orders were issued banning assembly of more than four people in some public places, 14 districts were declared sensitive areas, and Assam police personnel, 218 companies of additional forces, were deployed in the state to prevent any breach of peace.

The NRC has immense significance for the people of the north eastern state which witnessed a six-year-long movement from 1979 to 1985 seeking detection and deportation of illegal Bangladeshis.

The movement finally led to signing of the Assam Accord of 1985 by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the leaders of the agitation belonging to the All Assam Students Union and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad.

The NRC updation process, which started in the state on orders of the Supreme Court in 2013, is being carried out by the Registrar General of India and is being monitored by the apex court.

The government has assured that the people left out of the Final NRC will not be detained and they can appeal against their exclusion in the Foreigners' Tribunals (FT) and subsequently move higher courts.

On Saturday morning, hard copies of the supplementary list of inclusions were available for public view at NRC Seva Kendras (NSK), offices of the Deputy Commissioner and offices of the Circle Officer during office hours.

The status of both inclusion and exclusion were on view on the NRC website (www.nrcassam.nic.in), which, however, crashed within a few minutes of the publication of the list apparently due to heavy traffic with an error message saying, "The site cannot be reached". It resumed work soon.

However, the BJP, which had been clamouring for the NRC for years, was far from happy.

Fearing exclusion of a large number of Hindus, the saffron party's man in the northeast Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Friday he had lost all hope in the present form of the NRC. "As so many genuine Indians are out" of the document.

"The NRC is no quarter-final, semi-final and final for driving out Bangladeshis. Wait for a while and you will see more finals under the BJP regime," he said.

He also pointed out that while border districts like South Salmara and Dhubri saw six-seven per cent deletions of names, in tribal-dominated Karbi Anglong the exclusions were as high as 16 per cent.