The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Assam government will move the Supreme Court again for conducting re-verification of 20 percent of the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) data in the districts bordering Bangladesh.
The party will also seek re-verification of 10 percent of data from the mainland of Assam.
The draft NRC came as a surprise for the BJP, in the state and at the Centre, as many from the border districts, where the population is dense, made it to the list. It was presumed that the majority of them were illegal Bangladeshis.
Calling the finalisation of NRC list a "mixed bag", the party believes that several "technical flaws" could have seeped in the drafting process, leading to the exclusion of Bengali Hindu refugees who had crossed over to Assam before 1971.
"The NRC authority has registered many cases where documents were questionable after which we asked for a re-verification of 20 percent of the cases in border districts and 10 percent in other districts as we found that in border areas, where populations were high, deletions were low, whereas in tribal areas deletions were higher in proportion," Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told The Hindu.
"The Supreme Court denied that request. We will go back again to the SC and ask that at least in two districts, on a pilot basis, reverification should happen," he added.
The SC had recently rejected BJP's plea for re-verification of the draft NRC.
Sarma, who is often referred to as the Amit Shah of the northeast, had said, "We have lost hope in the present form of the NRC right after the draft. When so many genuine Indians are left out, how can you claim that this document is a red-letter for the Assamese society?"
In the final NRC list released on Saturday, the ones left out are mostly Bengali Hindu refugees who had come to Assam before 1971, or people who couldn't furnish enough documents.
The state BJP president Ranjeet Kumar Dass had said that the NRC will not protect the socio-political or economic rights of Hindus in Assam. "Our government will definitely come out with legislative measures to protect rights of Indian citizens left out of the NRC," Dass had said.
On Saturday, the final NRC list was released which made 30.1 million people eligible to be included, while leaving out more than 1.9 million.
(With agency inputs.)
