“Till now, the government has not taken any decision to prepare National Register of Indian Citizens at the national level,” Minister of State for Home, Nityanand Rai has said in a written reply to a query raised by AITC MP Nadimul Haque.
This is in stark contrast to the statement made by the Union home minister Amit Shah three months ago in November 2019 when he said, “The Assam exercise was carried out under a Supreme Court order. NRC will be carried out across the country, will be done in Assam again at the time, no one from any religion should be worried.”
Amid the staunch protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), is the home ministry’s latest statement proof of the government’s change of heart or just another of the government’s statements where they say one thing but do another?
Though Amit Shah has gone on record multiple times post the anti-CAA-NPR-NRC protests to say that the government has no plans in a nationwide NRC and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has followed the dictum, Shah’s previous statements have always said the opposite.
Addressing election rallies at Chakradharpur and Baharagora, Shah had even set a deadline for the implementation of the NRC saying, “Today, I want to tell you that before the 2024 polls the NRC will be conducted across the country and each and every infiltrator identified and expelled. Rahul Baba (Congress leader Rahul Gandhi) says don’t expel them. Where will they go, what will they eat? But I assure you that before the country goes to polls in 2024 all illegal immigrants will be thrown out.”
President Ram Nath Kovind too had on June 20, 2019 said that the Modi government had decided to implement the NRC on a priority basis, stating that illegal infiltrators posed a threat to the country’s internal security, leading to a social imbalance and putting a pressure on the nation’s limited livelihood opportunities.
With regards to the NPR, that is a biometric database of all ‘usual residents’ in India, the government said that it would update the National Population Register (NPR) between April 1 and September 30, 2020, along with the House listing and House census throughout the country, except for Assam.
The government also dismissed the question posed before it in which Haque asked whether the NPR will form the master data source of the NRC saying that the question “does not arise”. In the past, the government has described the NPR to be the first step towards the NRC.
However, the MHA has indicated that it is reluctant to drop the contentious questions from the NPR regarding the date and place of birth of parents, reported The Indian Express. A standing committee on the MHA headed by Congress MP Anand Sharma that has asked the government to use the Aadhaar data for the NPR updation said, “The Ministry submitted…the Date & Place of Birth of Parents were collected in NPR 2010 as well for all parents who were enumerated within the household,” the report stated. “For parents living elsewhere or expired at the time of enumeration, only the names of parents were collected. To facilitate back-end data processing and making the data items of date and place of birth complete for all households, details of parents are being collected in a more comprehensive manner in NPR 2020.”
The NPR and NRC are being seen as controversial for requiring Indian citizens to prove their Indian citizenship through various documents; though an official list of such acceptable documents has not been issued. The minorities and the marginalized are to be hit the worst because a large part of India’s population may not have such documents in the first place.
To top that, the CAA is going to allow citizenship to Hindus, Buddhists, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs and Christians from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, leaving out Muslim migrants and act as a tool to exclude the marginalized minorities, allowing them to be dubbed as ‘foreigners’, ‘doubtful citizens’ and even ‘infiltrators’.
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Home Ministry says no religion-wise break-up of citizenship data; NCP alleges foul play