Jamaat-e-Islami Hind expresses deep concern over draft NRC that excluded over four million people from citizenship

Jamaat-e-Islami Hind expresses deep concern over draft NRC that excluded over four million people from citizenship

NEW DELHI: Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) has expressed deep concern over the release of the draft NRC that has excluded over four million people from the citizenship of India.

In a statement to the media today, JIH President Maulana Syed Jalaluddin Umari said: “we are deeply concerned with the publication of the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Thus far the NRC has held about 40 lakh people (more than 10% of the state population) of the 3.3 crore applications to be invalid and hence disqualified to be bonafide citizens of India. According to the Assam Accord signed in 1985, anyone who entered the state after 24 March 1971 is considered an illegal resident. For acceptance into the NRC the onus of proof (to prove citizenship) was the responsibility of the applicant. But genuine citizens, who are impoverished and could not maintain proper records because of their homes being exposed to the vagaries of nature, are impacted and now face the brunt of being branded as foreigners. Most of those who could not make it into the NRC were due to minor inaccuracies in their documents. The government must look into complaints regarding NRC officials who exhibited bias and discrimination against a particular linguistic community and did not accept their application despite possessing all legal papers’’.

Maulana Umari continued: “It is the job of the government to ensure that those left out in the NRC be given ample time and opportunity to carry out the necessary formalities for providing the necessary documents and correct the many anomalies and discrepancies found in the draft NRC wherein the names of children are present but not their parents and vice versa. The other responsibility of the government is to keep a strict eye on the law and order situation and prevent miscreants and anti-social elements to use the NRC issue as an excuse to engineer riots and large scale violence against the minority community by branding them as foreigners, infiltrators and terrorists. The role of some in the media has also been very unhelpful as they have started a virtual hate campaign against these 4 million people which is aiding the hate agenda of the communal and fascist forces in our country’’.