It is very heartening to note that the Supreme Court of India on Friday admitted a writ petition that has sought a comprehensive re-verification of the entire process of preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Having admitted the writ petition, the apex court has also issued notices to the Union Government, the Registrar General of India (RGI), the Government of Assam, the Assam NRC coordinator, and a few other respondents and directed them to submit their responses. Important to note, the writ petition has been filed by none other than Hitesh Dev Sarma, a former state NRC coordinator. He pleaded with the Supreme Court to direct the authorities concerned to carry out a comprehensive re-verification of the NRC. As pointed out by Sarma – and which is also common knowledge – the NRC, which has already been prepared, has “massive” errors. While the basic purpose of preparing the NRC was to enlist names of all Indian nationals residing in Assam since independence, the fact remains that the names of several lakh persons of doubtful citizenship credentials have found a place in the NRC through various means. The NRC was first prepared in Assam almost simultaneously with the Census exercise of 1951 in order to segregate and keep out a large number of people from erstwhile East Pakistan who had entered the state illegally immediately after Partition. While thousands of Hindu Bengalis fled from erstwhile East Bengal after they suddenly discovered that the Partition had pushed them into East Pakistan, a large number of “land-hungry” Muslims also flocked to Assam to occupy land in order to fulfil the long-term dream of the Muslim League to change the region’s demography and merge it with East Pakistan. Though the NRC had names of only genuine Indian citizens, illegal migrants continued to stay back unlawfully in Assam after the 1951 NRC was prepared. One must place on record that Gopinath Bardoloi and his two successors, Bishnuram Medhi and Bimala Prasad Chaliha, were out and out against letting any infiltrator from East Pakistan stay in Assam. Because of this, all three Chief Ministers had to face the wrath of Prime Minister Nehru. But in the post-Chaliha era, the Congress adopted a policy of using the infiltrators as a vote bank, thus creating a situation which was favourable for them to get enrolled as voters, procure all kinds of government documents, and avail all kinds of facilities in Assam. Additionally, several governments in the past also looked the other way in order to facilitate their encroaching upon or occupying illegally large tracts of land belonging to the government as well as individuals and institutions. It was during the AASU-led Assam Movement of 1979-85 demanding detection and deportation of illegal migrants that the demand for updating the NRC also came up. While successive regimes ignored the demand for obvious reasons, it was in 2010 that the Supreme Court directed updating the NRC of 1951. When a pilot project for updating NRC was taken up in two LACs, some pro-infiltrator groups created a situation to abort it. In 2013, the Supreme Court issued fresh directives, which led to preparing a fresh NRC, and accordingly, a massive exercise led to publishing the final NRC on August 31, 2019. But the Assam government refrained from accepting it as it is and sought partial re-examination of the NRC – 20 per cent in the districts bordering Bangladesh and 10 per cent in other districts in the state. Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma is on record saying that a lot of fake family trees were created by some techies from outside by manipulating data and made a mess of the entire NRC. Though the final NRC initially did not include names of around 40 lakh applicants, the figure came down to around 20 lakh after verifications of claims and objections. Hitesh Dev Sarma, a retired IAS officer who has filed the writ petition, incidentally is a former NRC State Coordinator and thus an insider to the process of anomalies, especially when he had served as a deputy under the previous State Coordinator, a senior Assam-cadre IAS officer from outside the state. Given this, he is believed to be a witness to how the names of a large number of persons with doubtful nationality status were included in the NRC during his predecessor’s time. There have been allegations that the names of a large number of persons who were earlier declared as foreigners by the tribunals had found a place in the NRC, apart from the names of descendants of foreigners, doubtful voters and persons with pending cases before the Foreigners Tribunals. Such instances apart, the petitioner has also highlighted that the CAG report for the year ending March 31, 2020, had flagged financial irregularities of more than Rs 260 crore and recommended fixing responsibility on the then State Coordinator.