December 31 deadline: Assam NRC draft will only be a ‘part’ draft

The NRC is being prepared to segregate names of genuine Indian citizens living in Assam from those who had illegally entered the state from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971

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At an NRC Seva Kendra in Guwahati. Dasarath Deka

The much-awaited draft National Register of Citizens (NRC), for which the Supreme Court had fixed December 31 as the deadline, would now only be a “part” draft. There would be another publication of the remaining portion of the draft NRC at a later date. This became clear from an order issued by Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman on Friday, in which they also said that names of applicants not included in the draft NRC to be published by December 31 would be included in the subsequent draft NRC if found eligible after scrutiny.

“The claims/cases of the left out applicants whose names are not included in the draft NRC to be published on or before 31.12.2017, will be scrutinised and thereafter, if found eligible, would be included in the subsequent draft NRC,” the judges said. “We also make it clear that the publication of the draft NRC is not the end of the process and against such draft publications, claims and objections of the aggrieved parties can be filed, which, naturally, will be verified in accordance with law,” the judges said. The Supreme Court order comes at a time when the authorities are racing against time to publish the draft NRC containing about 2.38 crore names as the government had recently committed before the apex court.

But with the verification process still on, a sizeable number of names from among the 2.38 crore that the government had committed to the Supreme Court, are not likely to be included in the draft NRC to be released by December 31. The Indian Express has gathered that many issuing authorities have not yet sent back verification reports of documents that have been sent to them by the NRC State Coordinator’s office, and this despite the fact that the process of sending such documents for verification had started in 2015 itself. Verification reports that have not come back to the NRC State Coordinator’s office include a large number of passports, birth certificates, land documents, and various other documents that the Supreme Court had listed as required for proving one’s eligibility to be included in the NRC.

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“Such verification reports are awaited not only from issuing authorities in other states, but also from districts within Assam,” an official said. Given this ground reality, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has said that genuine Indian citizens who do not find their names in the “first part publication” of the draft NRC on December 31 should not construe that their names would be left out altogether. “There will be subsequent publication of another draft NRC encompassing the names of remaining cases,” the chief minister’s office said in a statement.

The NRC is being prepared to segregate names of genuine Indian citizens living in Assam from those who had illegally entered the state from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971. Under the procedures adopted, one has to link oneself to a family member whose name had appeared either in the NRC of 1951, or to any of the state’s electoral rolls prepared till 1971.

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