Several people said they were told by the officers during the document scanning process that the documents wer... Read More

(This story originally appeared in on Aug 10, 2018)



GUWAHATI: A section of Hindi-speaking people whose names did not figure in Assam’s final draft of the National Register of Citizens ( NRC ) have alleged that they had submitted documents to prove that they hailed from other parts of India but were left out because the documents were in Devanagari script and Urdu dialect.

“The legal document which I have submitted belongs to my family, which hailed from Muzaffarpur in Bihar,” Mohan Kumar Shah, president of All Asom Bhojpuri Parishad for Tinsukia district , told ET. “As it is a legal document of 1951, it is in Devanagari script and the dialect is Urdu.”

Several others said they had submitted similar documents and were told by the officers during the document scanning process that the documents were difficult to decipher because of the script and the dialect.

On Thursday, about a hundred people gathered in Tingrai, a tea producing area in Tinsukia around 516 km from Guwahati to discuss their non-inclusion in the NRC. After the meeting, Shah said they had decided to meet Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and petition Union home minister Rajnath Singh regarding the exclusion of a large number of Hindi-speaking people from the NRC.

There are a large number of people across Assam whose families had shifted to the state from other parts of the country prior to 1950, Shah said.

“In British era people from Bihar, Odisha and Jharkhand were brought by the British to work in tea estates as construction labourers.

While people working in tea estates have by and large made it to the draft NRC, we people from Bihar and other Hindi-speaking people have been left out,” he said. The documents submitted by these people, he said, proved that their ancestors were from other states and that they belonged to those families.

