Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who had earlier gone on record to say that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) cannot be held in the state in their current form, has now written to the Centre for a formal order in the matter, reported NDTV.
One of BJP’s first allies who have refused to budge from its stand, the letter that has been written by a nodal officer for the Census and the NPR, a senior state government official to the Registrar General of India, makes two key points.
1. All the new questions like the birthplace of the mother and the father should be dropped from the form and old questions be allowed to remain.
2. The basis of the new NPR should be 2010 not 2015, as due to an error, the total population recorded in the last census was less than the one before, held in 2010.
In a meeting at Darbhanga on Sunday, CM Nitish Kumar said, “I won’t allow any kind of injustice against the minority community till I am the Chief Minister. NRC won’t take place here, and as far as NPR is concerned, it should happen on the basis of how it was conducted in 2010.”
In the month of January, speaking to reporters at a meeting, he had said, “NPR has been there since 2011. It was reviewed in 2015 and it is being done again in 2020. But new questions added in it are likely to create confusion. Thus we are of the view that the original format of NPR of 2011 be followed.”
“There is a lot of objection to providing information on the date of birth and place of birth. To be frank, hardly anyone knows about the exact date and place of their birth, especially people from the poor community. So we want this confusion to end,” he had told the legislators and parliamentarians of the Janata Dal (United) and other district chiefs.
With regards to the NPR, Orissa and Punjab have decided to not seek answers with regards to the question about the birthplace of parents. Kerala has decided it will not participate in the exercise and West Bengal has put the exercise on hold. However, even after the disagreement of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Maharashtra CM and Shiv Sena Chief Uddhav Thackeray has given his go-ahead to the NPR while saying that he would form a three-member committee (one member from each party of the coalition) to look into the questions.
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