NRC final list : AIDUF changes stand, thanks SC

In a shift of stand over updation of NRC in Assam, the AIUDF Saturday thanked Supreme Court for taking the initiative to ascertain genuine citizens.

The foreigners issue in the state has been festering for the last 40 years but no government was willing to resolve it. It was the Supreme Court which took the initiative of NRC updation to ascertain the genuine citizens, AIUDF spokesman and MLA Aminul Islam told PTI.

Till now all Muslims in Assam were wrongly referred to as Bangladeshis. "But at least the NRC has helped to establish who is an Indian or a foreigner," the AIDUF spokesman said.

"It will be premature to say whether we are satisfied or dissatisfied with the final NRC, but it is a step towards resolving the foreigners' issue in Assam and this has been possible only due to the initiative of the Supreme Court," he said.

The final NRC published on Saturday excluded 19,06,657 persons. A total of 3,11,21,004 names were included out of 3,30,27,661 applicants.

All India United Democratic Front (AIDUF), which is led by Badruddin Ajmal, had earlier alleged that some officers associated with NRC have been given verbal orders by different quarters to include names of people belonging to a particular religion and delete those belonging to another.

Islam had alleged that there is an attempt to ensure a Muslim-free India and had even said that after Jammu and Kashmir the target is Assam where the ruling dispensation is set to disturb the minority community by putting pressure on them.

He, however, claimed on Saturday that AIUDF has since the very beginning called for a free and fair NRC comprising genuine Indian citizens.

The NRC will determine the identity of the Assamese people and is above all politics, the AIUDF spokesman added.

There is a possibility that the figure of 19.07 lakh people excluded from the final NRC could have been lower but the legacy data and other documents of many tracing their ancestry to other states did not find a place in it, he said.

There may be discrepancies in the final NRC with names of genuine Indian citizens left out and foreigners included due to human-errors which must be corrected with the help of the judiciary, he said.

"We will give legal help to genuine Indian citizens whose names have been left out," Islam said.

He said that different governments at the Centre and the state had over the years presented divergent figures of illegal immigrants.

A former union home minister had said in Parliament that there were 50 lakh Bangladeshis in Assam and a former governor claimed that six thousand foreigners entered Assam daily, he said.

"Successive governments at the Centre and the state, including the two terms of the AGP government led by Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, made no attempt to resolve the issue but kept it alive for their own political interests," Islam added.

Mahanta was a president of the AASU, which had spearheaded the six-year long movement in the state. He was one of the signatories of the Assam Accord in 1985 which had "detection, deletion and deportation" of illegal Bangladeshi migrants as one of its clauses.