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Assam NGO files FIR against former NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela
“We suspect there was manipulation in family tree verification during the process that led to inclusion of many illegal and doubtful persons in the updated NRC,” said Abhijeet Sharma of Assam Public Works (APW).
A Guwahati-based NGO has lodged a police complaint against former coordinator of National Register of Citizens (NRC) Prateek Hajela, alleging manipulation of family tree verification to include names of illegal migrants in the list, which was to include names of genuine Indian citizens.
“We suspect there was manipulation in family tree verification during the process that led to inclusion of many illegal and doubtful persons in the updated NRC,” said Abhijeet Sharma of Assam Public Works (APW), whose petition in the Supreme Court in 2009, had set the ball rolling for updating the NRC for Assam.
“We suspect Hajela and his close associates in collaboration with some officers, data entry operators and leaders from minority community used government mechanism to insert names of illegal migrants in the list,” Sharma added.
APW has filed the first information report (FIR) against Hajela and his unnamed associates with Assam criminal investigation department (CID) on Monday.
This is the 10th FIR lodged by APW alleging irregularities in the updated NRC and seeking re-verification of the entire process. The NGO plans to file 12 more such complaints in future.
The updated NRC, which was made public in August 2019, had left out 1.9 million of the nearly 33 million applicants. The list was dubbed by almost all parties and organisations as faulty citing exclusion of genuine citizens and inclusion of persons with doubtful identity.
The NRC was first prepared only for Assam in 1951 on the basis of the census conducted the same year. The process to update the 1951 list started in 2015 following directions from the Supreme Court, which acted on petitions seeking detection of illegal immigrants, especially from Bangladesh.
The updated list was to include names of all those persons (or their descendants) who appear in the 1951 NRC, or in any of the electoral rolls up to the midnight of March 24, 1971—when the liberation war for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan began.
The verification of an applicant’s family tree with help of records provided to show his/her link to an ancestor included in the 1951 NRC or in subsequent voter rolls was a key part of the process to update the list.
“The verification of a family tree would have been the fool proof method of NRC verification, had it been done properly. But as there was no quality check, the officers with migrant backgrounds got a free hand to include names of the suspected foreigners at their will. The entire mischief was done by the then state coordinator in connivance with some antinational element,” the FIR stated.
In November 2019, three months after the NRC was published, Prateek Hajela, an IAS officer, was transferred to Madhya Pradesh following a SC order. The NRC process is still in limbo as the updated list is yet to be notified by the Registrar General of India and the process of filing of appeals by those left out of the list hasn’t started.
In May this year, Hajela’s successor Hitesh Dev Sarma filed an application in the apex court seeking a complete, comprehensive and time-bound re-verification of the updated draft as well as the supplementary list of NRC as some “glaring anomalies of serious nature” were detected in the process.
The application sought re-verification to be done under supervision of a monitoring committee preferably represented by district judge, district magistrate and superintendent of police.
