Any delay that extends the process till the 2019 poll season is expected to help the BJP’s campaign by giving the party a poll plank and cause to seek re-election.
New Delhi: The much-anticipated final draft of the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam will miss its 30 June release date, with the state government moving the Supreme Court to seek a deadline extension. The court will hear the matter on 2 July.
According to highly placed sources in the Assam government, the state coordinator for the NRC had moved the Supreme Court to seek an extension on the grounds that work could not be completed because of the flood situation in the state.
The Supreme Court had directed the government to complete the process by 30 June, including the disposal of claims and objections. However, the authorities had said they could only publish the complete draft by then, after which claims and objections would be taken up, and the final list drawn up.
Any delay that extends the process till the 2019 poll season is expected to help the BJP’s campaign by giving the party a poll plank and cause to seek re-election.
A citizen or not
The Supreme Court-monitored update of the NRC began in September 2015 under the then Congress-led state government.
The updated NRC, first published after the 1951 Census, will use 24 March 1971 as the cut-off date to identify immigrants from Bangladesh as citizens.
The first draft of the NRC, published on 31 December last year, named around 1.90 crore people out of 3.29 crore applicants. Work has since been on to verify the remaining names.
Political repercussions
The fact that this was one of the BJP’s key poll promises ahead of 2016 means the party would want to be seen acting on it. However, the matter is far more complex. The governments in the state and the Centre have no clarity on the next step to be taken after the final list is out and ‘illegal immigrants’ are identified.
Deportation, they admit, wouldn’t be feasible given the humanitarian and diplomatic aspects attached, which leaves the grant of ‘stateless’ tag to those identified as one option.
The NRC exercise has put the BJP in the dock politically. It will not want to alienate its core voter base through inaction, but acting on the issue is equally tricky.
Thus, a delayed NRC process – in light of next year’s Lok Sabha polls – suits the BJP. The later the final draft is out, the more delayed the process of claims and objections will be, which further delays the final list. This will mean the BJP will not have much time before 2019 to act on the list, thus taking the pressure off it.
It will suit the BJP to produce the list just ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, or still keep it pending, to keep the issue burning and ask to be voted back in 2019 so it can fulfil this mandate.
There is also the issue of the The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which feeds into the NRC. According to the provisions of the bill, illegal immigrants who are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan will be eligible for citizenship in India. Thus, once the NRC updation is completed and if the citizenship law is brought in, it will allow the government to give citizenship to Hindus identified as illegal immigrants, while leaving out the Muslims.
A socially, politically charged exercise
The update is a politically as well as socially contentious issue in Assam, where immigration from Bangladesh has always triggered resentment in the state’s ethnic population, which believes the “outsiders” have been dipping into their resources.
The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the All Assam Students Union (AASU) led a six-year agitation demanding the identification and deportation of illegal immigrants, which ended in 1985 with the signing of the Assam Accord between leaders of the movement and the Centre.
The issue had been a key campaign plank for the BJP ahead of the 2016 assembly election.
However, minorities in the state fear the exercise will target them under the garb of weeding out immigrants from Muslim-majority Bangladesh. And it is feared the release of the final list might trigger unrest and chaos, which is why the Assam government had requested the union home ministry to send additional forces on 30 June.