Hindi-speaking people not in NRC seek help

Guwahati: The Hindi-speaking people living in Assam for decades have sought the intervention of authorities and asking to facilitate them with opportunity for inclusion of their names in the National Register of Citizen(NRC) by designating officers who can read Hindi and Urdu documents submitted by them to NRC Seva Kendras for inclusion of names.

Pointing out that hundreds of Hindi-speaking people could not find place in the final draft of the NRC as they had submitted documents either in Hindi or Urdu, All-Assam Bhojpuri Parishad president Kailash Gupta told this newspaper that they have come across hundreds of such instances in which documents produced in Hindi or Urdu were rejected.

Clarifying that the parishad, which is fighting for the cause of Hindi speaking people in Assam, was in favour of a foreigners-free NRC, Mr Gupta said, “We are meeting CM Sarbananda Sonowal today to apprise him about the difficulties faced by Hindi-speaking people in this process of updating the NRC.”

Asserting that non-Indian and Bangladeshi must be identified and deported from the state, Mr Gupta alleged that some NRC officials were vindictive during the process of verification and deliberately ignored and left the names of Hindi speaking people.

He argued that some names were dropped on the pretext that respective state governments failed to send verification report of documents submitted by applicants. “We have submitted the necessary documents so the onus of getting the verification report from respective state government was on NRC authorities,” he said.

It is significant that NRC authorities had sent 5.7 lakh documents to 25 states and UTs which had issued certificates to people belonging to those states and UTs but residing in Assam due to job or marriage. These docume-nts included educational certificates, birth certific-ates and documents related to the electoral process issued by the states of their earlier domicile.

Mr Gupta said that the onus of verifying these documents was on the NRC authorities. He, however, regretted that many names were also dropped as wife’s title was Devi in the document, different from husband. “In Bihar and UP most of married women use Devi as title after marriage which doesn’t match with the title of husband,” he said.