Guwahati: The Patriotic People’s Front Assam (PPFA) has expressed distress over recent debates about the voting pattern of Bangladesh-origin Muslims favoring a particular political party in the 2024 General Elections and the increasing aggressions towards the original inhabitants despite enjoying development benefits from the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments in New Delhi and Dispur. The PPFA insists on ending such discourse once and for all by initiating a correct National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam with the base year of 1951.
The forum of nationalist citizens based in northeast India wants to end these public discussions as early as possible. The people of Assam should not continue wasting time on the same old topic of East Pakistani-Bangladeshi migrants in this part of Bharat. Both the Central and State governments should take pragmatic initiatives to identify the illegal migrants in the State and deport them to their original places. If that is not possible at this moment, the illegal migrants must first be identified (using the 1951 cut-off year) and then proportionately distributed across the country, asserted the PPFA.
The forum also reminded that the Assam NRC is yet to be endorsed by the Registrar General of India (RGI), and hence there is ample scope for a complete re-verification through the due legal process. The NRC draft is alleged to include a large number of foreigners’ names, thanks to the technical mismanagement by former NRC State coordinator Prateek Hajela and his associates. The updating process was full of irregularities and corruption. The Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) detected financial irregularities amounting to over Rs 260 crores during the process and also fixed responsibility on Hajela and Wipro Limited.
It is worth noting how some motivated elements, including those in the mainstream media, tried to convince the Assamese community to accept the NRC draft as final (requiring no verification). At least one Guwahati-based television journalist was named and shamed on social media as a beneficiary of the multi-crore NRC scam, as he tried his best to garner support for Hajela’s ‘NRC works’ without considering its immediate consequences on national security and the future of the indigenous population. The forum concluded with a pertinent question: Will there be a fair probe into the NRC updation irregularities, and will guilty individuals, including the journalists, be held accountable for the crime?
(Nava Thakuria is a senior Indian journalist who contributes to various media outlets including print and digital platforms of India and across the world.)
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