GUWAHATI: Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Sunday said the state government is planning to make an effort to delete the names of illegal immigrants who made it to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by forging documents.
"We are slowly preparing a big plan. We will try to delete the names of those who got included in the NRC by resorting to forgery," Sarma told journalists, adding that the government had already begun speaking to experts in this regard.
Over 19.06 lakh of the 3.3 crore applicants were left out of the NRC’s complete list which was published in August 2019. During the NRC updation exercise, the authorities relied on documents including birth certificate, refugee registration certificate, land and tenancy records, citizenship certificate and government employment certificate to establish citizenship.
The NRC of 1951 was updated in Assam in deference to the Assam Accord of 1985 and under the Supreme Court’s direct monitoring. The Accord says the illegal immigrants, who entered Assam after the midnight of March 24, 1971, are to be detected and deported.
Sarma also claimed that he would personally like only those immigrants living in Assam from before 1951 to be included in the NRC "but we have to take the position of the Parliament and the Assembly which agreed on the 1971 cut-off year."
The publication of the NRC’s complete draft had stirred a hornet’s nest in the state.
Various groups and organisations claimed that lakhs of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants managed to make it to the list by submitting forged documents and demanded complete re-verification of the NRC process.
The state government had also sought 10 to 20 per cent re-verification of the documents of applicants in the districts bordering Bangladesh.
The Assam Public Works, an NGO that had first moved the apex court seeking the NRC’s updation, alleged that then NRC state coordinator Prateek Hajela had been solely responsible for the "erroneous" NRC list. His successor in the NRC office Hitesh Dev Sarma had filed an FIR with the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption wing of the state government alleging corruption and money laundering by Hajela.