Sabotage of NRC work

It is common knowledge that Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has been totally opposed to the updating of the NRC of 1951 from the very beginning. The tasks that should have been completed by 2007 maged to get started only in mid-2015, not because of any help from him, but rather in spite of him. One recalls with sadness how the two so-called pilot projects that were started in 2010 (before the Assembly elections of 2011) led to riots in Barpeta Road that took a toll of four lives, making it very convenient for Gogoi to abandon the entire exercise. Had it not been for the Supreme Court that took matters in hand, there would have been no updating of the NRC 1951. The Supreme Court took a hand in the entire exercise and approved modalities of the updating work apart from setting deadlines for each stage of the process. Later on, perhaps because it might have looked rather strange for him not to have any say in the matter, Tarun Gogoi made a statement over television asking people to cooperate with the process of updating the NRC. However, the ritualistic statement did not prevent him from repeated attempts to sabotage the entire work of updating the NRC. He started off by getting senior bureaucrats to impress upon the deputy commissioners that the updating of the NRC was a low priority undertaking and could not be allowed to come in the way of the development work of the State. This bizarre stand of the senior bureaucrats did not take into account the fact that there had been no development of the State worth talking about. Soon after this phase, the Chief Minister abandoned all considerations of propriety and decided to take the business of sabotaging the NRC update work upon himself. He even went to the extent of getting the government of Assam to file an affidavit before the Supreme Court requesting it to permit the use of the voters list of 2014 also as a valid document for the updating work of the NRC. But like everyone else, the Supreme Court obviously knew very well that such a disastrous step would make a mockery of the update exercise of the NRC. As expected, the Supreme Court turned down the Assam government’s request. It also helped matters by extending the last date for submission of applications for inclusion of mes in the NRC to August 31, 2015. The refusal of the Supreme Court to accept the voters list of 2014 as a valid document for the updating of the NRC must have come as a severe blow to Tarun Gogoi since this would mean the mes of a whole lot of illegal foreign voters being removed from the voters list for the 2016 Assembly elections. This is something that the Indian tiol Congress (INC), that has been winning elections in Assam for years with the help of illegal foreign voters, can hardly countence. The case becomes particularly insufferable for the INC for at least three good reasons: (a) The cleaning up of the voters list of the mes of illegal foreign voters will make it abundantly clear that the INC had been winning elections largely on the strength of its illegal vote bank of foreign tiols. (b) The INC has been concentrating solely on electoral success (with the help of illegal foreign voters, of course) at the cost of real development—a fact that should be very clear from the total lack of industrial development during the last three decades and the rate of unemployment in the State, which is the highest in the country. (c) The shift from real development to mere electoral victory by hook or by crook has also given rise to a level of corruption that the INC-run State government was quite uble to control given its cardil sin of winning elections with the help of foreign voters.

    The entire business of pampering illegal migrants from Bangladesh as prospective voters of the INC had given rise to several illegal and unethical practices like issuing permanent resident certificates to illegal migrants, to providing them with ration cards and getting their mes entered in the voters lists of the State. We now have information about something even more sinister that can result in the sabotaging the NRC of 1951. There is now a flourishing racket in Dhubri and elsewhere of issuing fake birth certificates so that a whole lot of mes that ought not to be in the updated NRC of 1951 can get included. Any true citizen of Assam (meaning Indian citizens resident in the State) whose ancestors have lived here for over 100 years would be committing a serious act of treason against his/her State as well as an act of betrayal against its people if such a person were to help the enemies of the State by being part of the racket of producing and distributing fake birth certificates so that the mes of foreigners can be entered in the NRC merely on the basis of fictitious proofs of their having been born in the State. Here is a situation where any government employee ordered to become a culprit in this nefarious purpose has the sacred duty of disobeying illegal and unethical orders and of not letting greed be a deciding factor. It is important for every indigenous resident of Assam to realize that there is really no work for the State government or for the people of Assam as important as the updating (not “updation”) of the NRC. It is sad that the Chief Minister of the State himself should be so hell-bent on sabotaging such an important undertaking.