Assam’s NRC final draft: Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee says she will not let this happen in West Bengal

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Tuesday that 4 million people who voted for the government have suddenly lost their right to vote. She added that all the people who were once citizens of India have been turned into refugees by their own country.
It was not only the Bengalis who are suffering but the minorities, she said. Addressing the media over Assam’s NRC final draft, Bengal CM said that she does not want to see her motherland getting divided.
Mamata Banerjee said that she will not allow this to happen in her state because she was there to support the people. She further added that she was shocked to see that the names of former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s family members were not mentioned in the final draft of Assam’s NRC.
Ms. Banerjee who is upset after more than 4 million people were left from the final draft of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) called in a press conference on Monday and stated that all those people who had not been named in the final draft can come and live in her state.
The following remark by the Bengal CM comes after Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh claimed that the following NRC data is just a draft and the final list will be released in December. He had further stated that those missing from the list won’t be considered foreign nationals and no action will be initiated against them.
Criticising the Centre over the final draft of NRC, Mamata Banerjee said that they cannot push the people back into the dark hole. She added that she believes in humanity.
The final draft of Assam’s NRC was released on Monday, July 30. The draft presented by the officials had recognised 28,983,677 locals as the citizen of India. Later it was found that the draft had missed over 4 million people.
After the draft was presented, the State and Centre authorities had stated that those missing from the list will be getting a fair opportunity to appeal to the concerned authorities and raise their objections.
While slamming the Centre over the final draft of Assam’s NRC, Bengal CM added that her state will shelter all those people who were not mentioned in the list.
While commenting on the final draft of Assam’s NRC, Mamata Banerjee said that it was an attempt by the Centre to push Bengali’s back. She further questioned their future, asking “what if Bangladesh also denies them citizenship” In just one strike hundreds of thousands were turned into refugees, she said.
She further warned the Union Home Minister to not to play with humanity.
In Bongaigaon’s north Salmara 190 km from Assam’s capital Guwahati, Sanatan Rai heaved a sigh of relief after finding his name in the second draft of the National Register of Citizens(NRC) last week.
It has been a stressful year for the Rai family. One crucial detail had kept him and his family members from being listed in the first draft—his grandfather. The death of his parents and the fact that he himself never found out the name of his grandfather was the cause of all the trouble.
“My grandfather had died long back, but he did appear on the 1951 NRC list. But we did not know his name. We didn’t even interact much with him when growing up. So when the time came, all our cousins and I had to sit for months together to figure out his name and what we needed to do with the data,” Rai said.
“People had to submit their family trees manually, which included their ancestors whose legacy data they would quote in their application. We would then match the digitized family tree record with the manual one in case of any discrepancy,” Prateek Hajela State coordinator of NRC Assam said.
In south Assam’s Kashikotra district, Ipshita Baruah did not have an inkling about the whereabouts of her grandfather—without whose records, she stood no chance of being included in the draft NRC.
“My grandfather left when my father was very young and then my father came and settled down in Assam. We did not know how to go about making a family tree and where to get the information from. It took us six months, to trace our ancestors and then put it down in proper order,” she said.
Officials said that the task of putting a family tree together was infinitely more difficult for women in rural areas.
“Among the Muslim clusters here, you will find very few unmarried or divorced women. But these women have faced huge problems in the NRC…not only is the family tree given incorrectly but the Qazi-Nama (certificate of marriage) is also not recognized,” said a senior Assam government official in Kokrajhar, who asked not to be named.
Papri Bhattacharjee, who works for the Assam government, was taken by surprise when her name was not included in the final draft of NRC. Bhattacharjee, who got a new passport in 2016, submitted a voter list from 1966 which had her father’s name on it.
“Even that wasn’t enough to establish my lineage when I had applied for my passport,” she recounted on Tuesday. Back then, she found in her father’s home a registered deed showing her grandfather taking ownership of a property. “On the strength of that registered deed, I secured my passport,” she said.
The NRC authorities didn’t ask for those documents. They only asked to check the 1966 voter list, she said. However, while she was travelling abroad, her father was called to submit more documents to establish his lineage. He showed the same documents.
“In Assam, you learn at a young age to preserve documents from before 1971. But still it took some time to locate them,” she said.
Surprisingly, her father’s name has been included in the final draft but not hers. Ditto for her husband and two daughters. “I will have to go through the tedious process yet again,” she said.
In Assam’s hinterlands, especially in pockets with a sizeable Bodo population, the Assam Movement still forms the genesis of the demand for a National Register of Citizens (NRC). “After the 1971 war, these areas which had a predominant Bodo population were slowly replaced by Bengali Muslims, and it turned into a fight for identity and land,” said a senior state police official, who did not wish to be identified.
While a 2005 tripartite meeting between the centre, the Assam government and AASU decided to update the NRC, Pradip Kumar Bhuyan and his wife Banti, started working relentlessly to remove the names of all illegal immigrants from the electoral rolls of 2006.
“The Bhuyans spent their personal savings to approach the Supreme Court to update the NRC within a specified time limit. But neither the UPA government nor the state government did anything much to further the matter,” said a person, familiar with the developments.
The Bhuyans then approached Aabhijeet Sharma, president of Assam Public Works, an NGO, to file a written petition before the apex court in 2009. It was not until 2014 that the Supreme Court finally asked the NDA government to start the process of updating the NRC.
Significantly, the name of former vice-chancellor of Assam University Tapodhir Bhattacharjee, whose family has been living in Silchar from 1930s, has also not made it to the first draft of NRC.
“My father Tarapada Bhattacharjee was an elected MLA in 1962 and we have been living here since 30’s,” Bhattacharjee told to the media.
“We neither entered India as traffickers or as immigrants. We are not refugees. We are simple residents of India, who chose to make Silchar our home, at a time when Bengal had not been partitioned. We have been branded as Bangladeshis, as we speak Bangla.”
> Pratyusha Mukherjee