Ensure rights of NRC excluded: Gogoi urges CJI

Guwahati: Terming the present situation in Assam grave and unprecedented, former Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has urged Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to ensure that genuine Indian citizens are not deprived of their dignity and right to life and liberty as enshrined in the Constitution.
In the letter to the CJI, Gogoi said that even army and police personnel, family members of freedom fighters, MLAs, former MLAs and family members of the late President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and many others who have documents including Indian passports have been left out.
Questioning the exclusion of these people, Gogoi asked the CJI: “How can these people be excluded from the NRC when the voter list of 2019 prepared by the Election Commission, a constitutional body, by linking the voter list of 1966 where their names were included as Indian citizens?”
He said that at the time of publication of the draft NRC also, about 40 lakh people were left out including names of genuine Indian citizens. “It was expected that the NRC authority will be more cautious and the final NRC will be error free but unfortunately it has been found that lakhs of people belonging to all communities and religion were excluded from the list, leading to confusion and uncertainty among them,” he said.
Gogoi also mentioned how Himanta Biswa Sarma and state BJP president Ranjit Kumar Dass have rejected the final list, exposing the anomalies.
“The state government is also trying to blame the Supreme Court as they have been trying to make allegations about their limitations due to intervention of the apex court. The Supreme Court was not the implementing authority for the NRC but the Central government is. It is nothing but a total failure,” he said.
He said that those people who were left out of the NRC were not declared as foreigners, then why should they go to the Foreigners’ Tribunals. (IANS)