The Govt of Assam is readying to file a fresh affidavit in the Apex Court seeking 20 per cent sample re-verification of names included in the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC NSE 2.22 %) in the districts bordering Bangladesh & a 10 per cent sample reverification of names in the remaining districts.

Home minister Amit Shah had discussed the NRC issue on Sept 20 with Assam CM Sarbananda Sonowal and state finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. It was decided that the State Govt will file a fresh affidavit in the Supreme Court.

Assam home secretary Gyanendra Dev Tripathi told the news agency that “We are readying the affidavit. As in earlier occasions our prayers were disallowed, we will seek review with a fresh petition".

Earlier, the Top Court has rejected the reverification petition. NRC is an exercise to weed out illegal immigrants & is monitored by the Top Court.

Sarma, after the meeting, had said that the State Govt will once again raise in the Top Court the issue of 20 per cent sample reverification of names included in the draft NRC in the districts bordering Bangladesh & a 10 per cent sample reverification of names included in the draft NRC in the remaining districts. The Centre will support the State Govt’s affidavit in Supreme Court, he added.

Assam Public Works (APW), the main petitioner in the NRC case in the Supreme Court, has sought 100 per cent reverification of the NRC. The organisation has filed eight affidavits in the Court in this regard. 

“It’s more than a month since the meeting was held & what has stopped the government from filing the affidavit? This shows there are some elements within the government who do not want the affidavit to be filed. The government is not serious about filing the affidavit.,”APW president Abhijeet Sharma told the news agency.

“Just before the publication of NRC in July last year, the government had filed an affidavit seeking reverification, which was rejected. It is more than a year now, the government is silent. NRC has become lip service for the government,” he added.

Sharma said former NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela had stated in court that 27% incidental reverification was already done during the claims & objections process, & that this had led to exclusion of 102,462 names.

“If 27% reverification resulted in the exclusion of over 1 lakh names, imagine what will be the numbers if the rest 73% is reverified? There is a need for 100% reverification,” said Sharma. “This also reflects that quality of work was utterly poor. We were astonished as to how with this quality of work final NRC was allowed to be published on Aug 31 last year.”

Sharma said the fact that the NRC in the current form is ridden with irregularities is confirmed, as the NRC coordinator, in an order to deputy commissioners, had asked officers in different districts to verify the speaking orders, for in several cases the authorities had found anomalies. They have been asked to scrutinise the speaking orders of the disposing officers (DOs).

The final NRC list, published on Aug 31, 2019, had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry while leaving out over 1.9 million people.

The BJP in Assam has often said that as the NRC authority refused to accept the refugee certificates issued prior to 1971, Bengali Hindu, Koch Rajbonshi & Buddhist people got excluded from NRC in large numbers. 

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