From Our Correspondent
Guwahati: The Supreme Court has directed both the Centre and Government of Assam to furnish an estimated time-frame for updating the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRC) in one single Legislative Assembly Constituency (LAC).
The court directive is expected the expedite the yet to be started process of updating the 1951 NRC in Assam in order to help detect the illegal migrants who came to Assam after March, 1971.
This section of illegal migrants are to be deported after proper detection as per the Assam Accord that was signed in 1985 between the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and Government of India as a culmination of six years long Assam Agitation against illegal foreign nationals residing in the State.
The direction was issued to both the governments by a Division Bench of Supreme Court comprising Justice H. L. Gokhale and Justice Ranjan Gogoi which heard a writ petition filed by Assam Public Works (APWs) on the updating of the NRC.
The apex court heard the counsel for the Central Government and Assam Government for hours focusing mainly on the issue of ‘D’ voters, according to a source in APW.
The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), which was also a petitioner in a similar case and has been clubbed with the APW’s Writ petition, was also present in the court on Tuesday.
The Government of Assam and Government of India were granted time till July 31 to furnish details about how much time it needs to complete the whole process of updating NRC of one single Assembly constituency.
President of the APW, Aabhijeet Sarma said that the court took a critical view of the delay in updating the NRC. He told Government of Assam that even after lapse of so many years from 1985 to 2013, it is still not ready and stuck with the modalities of NRC.
Meanwhile, APW in its counter-affidavit has argued that frequent changes of modalities and Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) regarding updating of the NRC 1951 by the Government is indicative of an unclear and confused state of mind.
The AASU advisor Samujjal Bhattacharya said they welcomed the additional affidavit filed by Government of Assam and which was supported by Centre’s counsel on modalities for updating the NRC.
The modalities are same as those agreed upon by AASU and Assam Government, he said. The Assam government earlier on July 4 had finalized the modalities for updating the NRC of 1951 in a meeting with the AASU.
However, there was disagreement between the AASU and the Government of Assam over fixing possible deadline for completion of the process f updating the NRC.
The AASU demanded that the process should be completed before 2014 Lok Sabha polls while the State government said that the process would be completed as soon as possible.