The Assam NRC Fiasco

With Assam electing a new assembly this month, the National Register of Citizens is going to be a highly emotive issue, which, if not handled properly, will create huge disorders in a state that is traditionally vulnerable to multiple insurgencies having serious strategic implications. RAJEEV BHATTACHARYYA enumerates factors contributing to the fiasco

- Rajeev Bhattacharyya

On February 2, 2021, the centre informed Parliament that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be notified in Assam only after implementation of an ‘appropriate security regime’ similar to the security regime provided for Aadhaar data. Replying to a query from Assam Member of Parliament Abdul Khaleque, minister of state for home affairs Nityanand Rai added that the list of inclusions and exclusions from the register shall be made available to the state government, central government and Registrar General of India (RGI) only after enactment of the regime.

However, no deadline for completion of the enormous task had been specified in the reply fuelling speculation over whether it would actually be completed. The RGI has not yet not yet issued a notification on the NRC which means that the register is not a legal document. The ruling BJP has repeatedly asserted that it would not accept the register in the current form as the names of many foreign nationals are suspected to have been enrolled.

The NRC which was first prepared in Assam in 1951 is a list of citizens who were able to prove through a set of documents that either they or their ancestors had settled in the state before March 24, 1971, a day before neighbouring Bangladesh attained independence from Pakistan. The government had agreed to update the register in an agreement inked with the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) in 2005. But the exercise was initiated only after the Supreme Court intervened following a Public Interest Litigation filed by Assam Public Works four years later.

The register was updated by the RGI which also conducts the census operations in the country and monitored by the Supreme Court. The compilation of the list incurred an expenditure of around