GUWAHATI: The Assam government on Sunday announced crackdown on Aadhaar card holders who did not apply to get their names included in the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
Talking to the press while campaigning for the panchayat elections on Sunday, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said, “We will launch a major drive within next two to four days against those who obtained Aadhaar cards and are living in Assam but did not apply for the NRC.”
He said the state government has already stopped issuing Aadhaar cards to those who did not apply for the NRC. “However, before we took this step, many had obtained Aadhaar cards in Assam without applying for the NRC,” he added.
The chief minister also said that the state government had prepared an action plan to detect and drive out the illegal immigrants who entered Assam over the past few years.
In September last year, Sarma stated that four Assam districts had more Aadhaar card holders than the projected population. The four districts are Barpeta and Dhubri in lower Assam, and Morigaon and Nagaon in central Assam. Among these, Dhubri shares a border with Bangladesh.
“We found that 103.74% people were issued Aadhaar cards in Barpeta, 103.48% in Dhubri, 101.74% in Morigaon and 100.68% in Nagaon. Surely, suspected immigrants have managed to procure Aadhaar cards,” Sarma had said.
Later in December, the state government decided that all applications for Aadhaar will be rejected unless the applicant or the family had not applied for the NRC.
The NRC of 1951 was updated in Assam in deference to the 1985 Assam Accord and with the cut-off date of March 24, 1971. Over 19.06 lakh of the 3.3 crore applicants were left out of the NRC’s complete draft published in August 2019.
Meanwhile, three more persons were arrested in Assam for alleged anti-India remarks over the Pahalgam terror attack, taking the total number of such arrests to 16. The arrested trio were identified as Dadhichi Dimple alias Dimple Bora, Tahib Ali and Bimal Mahato.
4 Bangladesh nationals arrested in Agartala
Security forces have arrested four Bangladeshi nationals from Agartala railway station for ‘illegally’ entering India, officials said on Sunday. Meanwhile, the BSF has stepped up patrolling along the India-Bangladesh border amid high alert following the Pahalgam terror attack.