On July 17, 2018, Sabrang India carried a petition by Avaaz titled Deleting Muslims where Avaaz alleged that as many as 7 million Muslims stand to be excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Subsequently, we received a comment on the story from a handle called Nrc Assam. The comment was actually a link to a tweet from the twitter handle @NRCupdateAssam which posted a rebuttal to Avaaz’s petition by the NRC State Coordinator.
A screen shot of Nrc Assam’s comment on the story may be viewed here:
The tweet by @NRCupdateAssam that was made at 8:15 pm on July 17, 2018, may be viewed here:
The complete rebuttal by the NRC to Avaaz’s allegations may be read here:
Even as the NRC’s comment (with a link to the rebuttal tweet) on the story was pending approval, Prateek Hajela, the NRC State Coordinator, gave the following quote to The Telegraph, “I have posted a rebuttal on Sabrang India about the international propaganda but they have not published it yet. They had come here to talk about NRC recently. So why are they sharing the fake propaganda despite knowing that NRC is being updated under legal mandate and is supervised by the Supreme Court? NRC does not differentiate on the basis of religion or language,”
It must be noted that while a team from Sabrang India did visit Assam and interview Mr. Hajela, Sabrang India has never misquoted Mr. Hajela. Also, we did not receive any other form of intimation from the NRC apart from the comment on the story. We did not receive any call or email requesting us to carry their rebuttal. However, in the interest of fairness we have carried the rebuttal within 48 hours! To say that Sabrang India is sharing “fake propaganda” is, therefore a wrong allegation. We believe in carrying all sides of a story and the right of reply, which is why we have carried the rebuttal in the first place.
We therefore request Mr. Hajela to email us at sabrangind@gmail.com if he has any concerns with respect to the matter before making statements about us to other publications.