List of Blunders Unending, Judicial Magistrate Left out of the NRC

Apart from the extended family of Assam’s first deputy speaker, ex-servicemen, government employees and a legislator, an officer of the state judicial service has also been left out of the final draft of the National Register of Citizen (NRC). The non-inclusion of his name in the NRC has been attributed to a “technical error”, which is undefined.

One of the possibilities – say sources – is that there was a technical error on the part of the officials while using computer programmes for preparing the draft.

Except Sarfaraz Nawaz, judicial magistrate (first class), the names of his entire family members have been included in the draft. He had submitted all the required documents, including the legacy of his father, to prove his citizenship. The papers he had submitted are valid, and have been accepted, and therefore, the status of his application has been considered “ok” (okay).

Raising questions on the omission of his name from the citizen register draft, he asked in a Facebook post, “Can Mr. Hajela (Prateek Hajela, the Supreme Court mandated coordinator of the NRC) tell me what this technical error is that stopped my name from appearing in the draft? After all, I did not hear any discussion or any statement from any NRC official (Mr. Hajela or anyone else) on the omission of names on technical grounds.”

He wrote that he was asked to not share the information regarding the exclusion of his name on any public forum. “By the way, I have been repeatedly asked not to share this on any public forum. I wonder why. I wasn’t given the reason for it. What are the NRC officials hiding?” read his post.

He said that it brought him to some larger questions: what is the number of persons whose names have been left out on technical grounds? Is this data available district-wise and community-wise? Will the NRC officials publish this data?

“These are very relevant and pertinent questions which require genuine and bona fide answers,” he said in the post.

“Lastly,” he said, “if the (technical) error was on the part of the NRC officials, why do I have to file a claim? There should be suo moto rectification of the same”.

“Will Mr. Hajela clarify?” he concluded.

NRC officials refused to comment on the issue.

After their names did not appear in the draft that was published on July 30, more than 40 lakh people will have to try to prove once again that they are Indian citizens.

There is no official demographic break-up of the data so far, and the apex court – which is supervising the updating process of the citizens register – has asked Hajela to submit district-wise data of the names that have been rejected in a sealed envelope. An unofficial district-wise list suggests that two Muslim majority districts – Hojai and Darrang – have the highest number of people whose names have not been included in the draft.

Bongaigaon – a district in lower Assam with a high concentration of Muslims and Bengali speakers – is believed to figure third in the list. The lowest rejections have taken place in three upper Assam districts, which are predominantly Assamese-speaking.

In most of the cases of rejections in the lower Assam districts, it is mostly married women and children have failed to make it to the draft list.

The citizen register is being updated in Assam for the first time since 1951 with an aim to separate citizens from what are being called illegal immigrants. To find a place in the final list, people had or have to establish that they or their ancestors came to the Northeastern state before the midnight on March 25, 1971. They had to submit an application with two sets of documents – legacy data to establish that their parents or grandparents lived in the state before the cut off year, and documents to prove their linkage with their ancestors.