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‘Pushed back Amit Shah 1000 km’: Tejashwi Yadav on Bihar resolution against NRC
Bihar is the first NDA-ruled state, which has demanded tweaking of the revised NPR form.
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has welcomed the Bihar government’s decision to reject Centre’s bid to carry out the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in the state. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav also used the occasion to target the Centre, especially Home Minister Amit Shah.
“Amit Shah says he won’t move back an inch. Today, the RJD and all of us together have pushed him back a thousand kilometre,” Yadav, the Leader of Opposition in Bihar Assembly, said in Gaya on Thursday.
The Bihar Assembly on Tuesday passed a unanimous resolution holding that the National Population Register (NPR) in the state would be implemented in the old 2010 format, save the inclusion of an additional column for transgender, and also rejected the NRC exercise.
Bihar is the first NDA-ruled state, which has demanded tweaking of the revised NPR form by dropping new columns such as mentioning the dates of birth of an individual’s parents and their birth place in the soon-to-be launched nationwide survey of usual residents of the country. Those living in a particular place for six months are defined as usual residents.
Earlier, Kerala and West Bengal decided not to implement the NPR exercise in their states. Congress-ruled Punjab announced that it would conduct the NPR in line with the 2010 format.
In a signal that the two alliance partners were on the same page on this matter, Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi asserted that people would not be required to produce any documents as claimed by Opposition parties.
NPR, a comprehensive biometric database of all “usual residents” in India, was created in 2010 and updated in 2015.
The Bihar Assembly also passed another unanimous resolution on Thursday - demanding a caste-based census in 2021 in which information about an individual’s caste be collected and compiled during the nationwide population count survey.
The demand, on which the wider policy of the Union government and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) is unclear, was pushed by chief minister Nitish Kumar months ahead of assembly polls in the state.
