NEW DELHI: As Home Minister Amit Shah said it was the Congress that started the National Population Register (NPR), the opposition party on Thursday said it had in 2006 stopped a pilot project initiated by the NDA government in 2003 for providing citizenship-based identity cards called MNIC (multinational identity cards) and had instead proceeded with the NPR, which was a list of ‘usual residents’.
Senior Congress leader Ajay Maken, who was MoS, Home, when NPR was implemented, said that based on the report of a Group of Secretaries, an empowered Group of Ministers decided to halt the pilot project to issue identity cards to citizens as it was cumbersome and difficult.
Maken said the Congress had only taken the first step for having a National Population Register but the BJP was seeking to link it with the NRC, which the Congress never wanted. Former home minister P Chidambaram too asserted that the NPR under the UPA was not linked to NRC.
“The BJP-led government has a larger and more sinister agenda and that is why the NPR approved by them is very dangerous and different in terms of the text as well as the context of NPR 2010.”
Referring to the video clip released by the BJP of the launch of NPR in 2010, Chidambaram said, “Please listen to the video. We were enumerating the ‘usual residents’ of the country. The emphasis is on residency, and not citizenship,” Chidambaram said.