GUWAHATI: A retired junior commissioned officer of the Army, aspiring to enroll his son in the service, is facing a predicament after the father-son duo was told they are not Indian citizens.
Elias Haque, 17, is a student of the Rashtriya Indian Military College in Dehradun. The dream of his father, Azmal Haque, to see his son pass out from the school and join the National Defence Academy is, perhaps, a step away. Destiny, however, is playing spoilsport and so is the government. “I want him to become a soldier and serve the nation. Not many get the chance of studying at the Rashtriya Indian Military College,” Azmal says proudly.
Azmal and his two children were among more than 40 lakh people left out of Assam’s NRC. He is now pinning hopes on the Supreme Court. He and seven others, including a retired Army man who had fought in the Kargil War, jointly moved the apex court in the first week of September. The court has fixed a hearing on October 19.
Hailing from Kalahikash village in Kamrup (rural) district in Assam, Azmal joined the Army in 1986 and retired in 2016. During his life in the Army, he had guarded the border with Pakistan in Punjab.“The NRC is a bogus exercise. The citizenship documents were not properly scrutinised as the NRC officials acted as per their whims and fancies. There are lakhs of families where some members made it to the list and some did not. How can one brother be a foreigner and another brother an Indian?” Azmal asks.
Mohd. Sanaullah, also of the same village, is a retired honourary captain of the Indian Army who had guarded the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir. He too missed the NRC bus along with his wife and three children. What is worse for him is he has been served a notice by a foreigners’ tribunal on the suspicion that he is an illegal immigrant. He now will have to prove his citizenship there, too.
He is critical of the move by NRC authorities to drop five List-A documents — NRC of 1951, pre-1971 voters’ lists, citizenship certificate, refugee registration certificate and ration cards — from NRC modalities.
“Who on earth in 1950s and 1960s knew he or she would require certain documents of that era to prove he or she is an Indian 60 to 70 years later? The NRC authorities are worried about losing credibility as only an insignificant number of people will be left out after the claims and objections process,” Sanaullah says.