The New Citizens' Charter

Just a couple of hours after the publication of the complete draft of the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) in Assam on July 30, the fractious debate in Parliament spilled onto the streets of West Bengal. Political parties were quick to give a communal colour to the exercise monitored by the Supreme Court.

- Kaushik Deka and Rahul Noronha

The legal impetus, of course, for the NRC was the need to remove illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from the state electoral rolls. The BJP government claims there was little political will to deplete a vote bank, but the Congress and other opposition parties insist the draft NRC, which has struck off four million people, is flawed.

For West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, it is a BJP conspiracy. “It’s a plan,” she said, “to throw out Bengali-speaking people and Biharis,” warning of division, and a situation that could lead to a “bloodbath and civil war”. She offered the four million people excluded from the draft NRC shelter in her state. The BJP countered by saying a similar effort in Bengal would root out several million illegal immigrants. In 2005, Banerjee herself, frustrated at not being allowed to raise the issue of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, had thrown her papers at the speaker’s podium in the Lok Sabha.

In any case, contrary to her claims of a religious and linguistic vendetta, reports have poured in from various parts of Assam of people belonging to several indigenous communities and tribes being omitted from the NRC. And many of them are Hindus. “Just around five percent of people in Muslim dominated districts such as Dhubri and Hailakandi have been excluded from the NRC,” says an official involved in the process, “but in Assamese-dominated districts such as Dibrugarh, or the tribal-dominated Karbi Anglong, the exclusion rates are much higher.”