Letter to BS: Govt should avoid short-sighted NRC policy to avoid disaster

With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah claiming that the NRC was the soul of the Assam Accord signed by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, which the Congress was afraid to implement, no one is left in doubt about his party’s likely contours of campaign strategy for the coming Lok Sabha elections. The party campaigners would whip up an artificial wave of nationalism to polarise the voters by portraying those excluded from the list as anti-nationals. Unlike the BJP president of West Bengal, who promised such an exercise would be undertaken in West Bengal too if the party came to power, Shah was non-committal. 

Even though the Supreme Court has clearly barred the government from any coercive action against over 4 million people not figuring in the final NRC draft, this by itself is not too comforting for them. The very process of reapplying for their inclusion in the final list of NRC and going through the tortuous process of appeal etc is a nightmare many can ill-afford. It is also doubtful if the administrative machinery is adequately geared to fairly handle such huge numbers. Those eventually left out would be staring at an uncertain future in a country they lived for generations. It is the duty of the government to ensure any short sighted policy misstep does not lead to an unmitigated human disaster. In this context, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s warning should not be brushed aside as a mere political rhetoric from a maverick leader.

S K Choudhury,  Bengaluru

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