Assam Congress bats for foreigners

Guwahati: The Opposition Congress, which claims credit for starting work on National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, on Sunday took a U-turn by not only demanding opportunity for those declared foreigners and kept in detention camps but also targeted the coordinator of the NRC directorate Prateek Hajela.

It started with Assam Congress asking the state government to take immediate steps to ensure that people lodged in detentions camps after being declared foreigners are given another opportunity to prove their citizenship.

Senior Congress leader and former minister Pradyut Bordoloi told reporters that the government should also look into charges of human rights violations of detainees who are mostly poor and illiterate. "It has been found that these poor and illiterate people are not aware of the fact that they had to physically appear before the foreigners' tribunals on time when they are summoned. As a result, they are declared foreigners. There are allegations that these people are then dragged to detention camps," said Mr Bordoloi while referring a case of 102 years old Chandradhar Das (102), a resident of Borai Basti in Karimganj district.

A day after Assam Congress called for another opportunity for those lodged in detention camps, the Congress MLA Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha alleged that ongoing process of updating the NRC was aimed at to target the genuine Indian citizens.

He went on accusing that the coordinator of NRC Prateek Hajela was acting at the behest of few students organization and conspiring to drop the names of a large number of genuine Indian citizens from the NRC on flimsy ground. Earlier, former minister and Congress leader Siddique Ahmed had stoked controversy by stating that there is an attempt to leave those Muslims who have been here for more than 400 years out of the NRC process. “If names of the genuine citizen of India get omitted from the NRC draft, the situation of Assam will become like that of Myanmar,” said Mr Ahmed He equated the condition of the Hindu Bengalis in the Barak valley with that of the Rohingyas in Myanmar. The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan-speaking people who reside in Rakhine province of Myanmar.