Guwahati: Leader of the Opposition and Assam Congress Legislature Party chief Debabrata Saikia has requested all chief ministers to personally ensure that all queries pertaining to verification of documents for inclusion in the NRC be processed and sent back from their respective states and Union territories as soon as possible.

In separate letters to the chief ministers, Saikia said the failure to send back the required documents after verification had resulted in lakhs of people, who had come to Assam from other states, being excluded from the final draft of the NRC.

“Even worse, such people are being called ” ghuspethiyas (infiltrators) by some political parties and viewed as illegal foreign migrants,” he stated.

The complete and final draft released on July 30 has seen non-inclusion of 40.07 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants who can stake claim for inclusion from August 30 to September 28.

Without referring to BJP national president Amit Shah who had dubbed those left out as ghuspethiyas in Parliament, Saikia urged the chief ministers not to waste even a day in order to rescue such genuine Indian citizens from being “objects of unjustified suspicion and abuse” because the smear campaign started by a section of “unscrupulous” politicians may find acceptance among “gullible” people.

The office of the NRC coordinator here had sent 572,809 documents for verification to 29 states and six Union Territories, of which about three lakh have been returned.

Registrar-General of India Sailesh had told the media that neighbouring Bengal was the biggest defaulter of all states. In March, the NRC coordinator had informed the Supreme Court that it had received only 7430 (only 6.46 per cent) documents of the 114,971 sent to Bengal.

NRC sources said the process will not be affected if the states do not verify the documents going by the Supreme Court’s March 27 order.

“But it is always welcome if they return the documents because these will be recorded for posterity,” an NRC source said.

According to the March 27 order, the apex court had asked the chief secretaries of the states and Union Territories to “send result of verification of the documents issued by their state(s)/UTs to the learned state coordinator, NRC, Assam forthwith so that the process of upgrading of 11 NRCs can be completed within the time schedule…”

Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Rohintan Fali Nariman had in the same order had made it clear that, “By way of abundant caution, we permit the learned state coordinator, NRC, Assam – in the event such verification reports are not received by the first week of May, 2018 – to complete the process through DM’s investigation (through house-to-house reverification) which may be completed by May 31, 2018.”

News Source Telegraph India