If There Will Be A Fair Probe Into The NRC Updation Irregularities And Hold The Guilty Individuals Accountable For The Serious Crime, Finally Assam Will Get A Fair NRC!
By Nava Thakuria, New Age Islam
1 July 2024
Is there any use of debates about the voting pattern of
Bangladesh-origin Muslims in favour of a particular political party in the
recently concluded national elections and an observed increase in their
aggressions over the original inhabitants despite enjoying development benefits
(including housing, sanitation, electricity, etc facilities) from the Bharatiya
Janata Party-led governments in New Delhi and Dispur? How long the people of
Assam will participate in such unfortunate discourses as it would result in
nothing. Is it not the time to go for a concrete resolution to address the
illegal migrant’s issue? Should not we raise voices for a correct National
Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam with the base year of 1951?
The pertinent issue came to the public domain as the
Patriotic People’s Front Assam (PPFA) insisted on ending such futile
discussions as early as possible. Expressing distress over the matter, the
forum of nationalist citizens based in northeast Bharat argued that the people
should not continue killing time with the same old topic of East
Pakistani-Bangladeshi migrants. Rather the celebrated forum urged both the
Central and State governments to take pragmatic initiatives to identify the
illegal migrants in Assam and deport them to their original places. If that is
not possible for any reason at this moment, the forum asserted that the illegal
migrants should be identified (with the basis of national cut-off year) and
then proportionately distributed across the country.
Assam Accord, signed after six years long historic agitation
in 1985, admitted to accept all Bangladesh-origin nationals in the State, who
entered before 21 March 1971. The argument was that prior to this year the land
was known as East Pakistan and anybody who came from the Islamic republic
cannot be sent to a new nation (read Dhaka will not accept and New Delhi had no
bilateral repatriation treaty). So it was primarily a problem of the Union
government, but the entire burden was imposed on Assam to accept hundreds of
thousands of East Pakistani nationals.
Question arises here, what prevented the agitating leaders
to request the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (who was present on the
occasion) to endorse the accord by signing along with the bureaucrats and
agitators. Then it would have been mandatory to debate in Lok Sabha and
probably a fair deal would have been achieved for the native populace of Assam.
Moreover, a demand could have been raised to shift a large portion of those
East Pakistani turned Indian citizens to other parts of Bharat (following a
proportional theory). Assam could have happily accepted its share (maybe one
hundred thousand foreigners) and proceed on the path of all round development
and steady progress.
The PPFA reminded that the Assam NRC is yet to be endorsed
by the Registrar General of India and hence there are ample scopes for a complete
re-verification of the draft with due legal processes. The NRC draft is also
apprehended to include a large number of foreigners’ names with the help of
tempered software (allegedly engineered by former NRC State coordinator Prateek
Hajela and his associates. Moreover, the updating process was full of
irregularities and corruption, as detected by none other than the Comptroller
& Auditor General of India. The national audit body identified large scale
financial irregularities to the tune of over
Rs 260 Crores during the process and it fixed responsibility on Hajela
(now retired under VRS) and Wipro limited (which functioned as the system
integrator).
Meanwhile, it was observed that some motivated elements,
including a few mainstream journalists, tried to convince the Assamese
community to accept the NRC draft as the fine one, which needs no verification.
At least one Guwahati-based television scribe was named and shamed on social
media as being a beneficiary to the multi-crore NRC scam, as he tried his best
to garner support to Hajela for the tremendous job the technocrat turned
bureaucrat had done. The greedy television talk-show host did not bother about
the immediate consequence of a fabricated NRC on national security and also the
future of indigenous families. The forum genuinely posed a question, if there
will be a fair probe into the NRC updation irregularities and hold the guilty
individuals accountable for the serious crime, and finally Assam will get a
fair NRC!
-----
Nava Thakuria is a
northeast India-based professional journalist who is an engineering graduate.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/nrc-irregularities-guilty-crime-assam-nrc/d/132613
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism