A long-awaited government report on Saturday dropped 1.9 million people from the citizens’ register in India’s northeastern state of Assam and identified over 31 million as bona fide residents. The report was part of an exercise to weed out illegal residents who migrated from Bangladesh into Assam.
The National Register of Citizens, popularly known as NRC in Assam, is being updated for the second time after a gap of almost 68 years to identify illegals who entered from Bangladesh after March 1971. The process of updating the register began in 2015 after a Supreme Court order in 2013. Government officials updated the register by doing a house to house survey, scrutinising proofs of citizenship submitted by residents and in some cases by investigating family trees.
The project, however, became controversial after human rights activists and journalists highlighted attempts to politicise it by Bharatiya Janata Party which rules in Assam. Over the years, the BJP leaders openly said their government would throw out Muslims who are not included in the NRC. The BJP leaders both in Assam and their senior colleagues in New Delhi linked the NRC to their party’s promise to identify and evict Bangla-speaking Muslims who they allege altered the demography of Assam state.
The report out on Saturday, however, seems to have backfired on the BJP as scores of Bangla-speaking Hindus were also excluded from the register. Hemant Biswa who is credited with the growth of the BJP in north-eastern states said the register should have excluded more people. His government had earlier identified four million people as illegals. His party colleagues said the NRC was a “conspiracy to help Muslims” and that the NRC software was bugged.
The entire exercise was done under the supervision of the BJP governments in Assam and in New Delhi. But now it appears that the report did not serve the party’s political objectives following the exclusion of scores of Hindus. The BJP is planning to amend the citizenship law to allow Hindus returning from foreign countries to become Indian citizens, a provision that specifically excludes Muslims and Christians.
It is no secret that the BJP uses issues of national security to facilitate political expansion and the NRC is one such example. The government has no clue what it would do with the illegals, it has assured Bangladeshi government on many occasions that no one would be deported to their country.
