india

Updated: Jul 01, 2020 03:02 IST

Union home minister Amit Shah on Wednesday said that the government will roll out an exercise for a countrywide National Register of Citizens (NRC).

At ‘Purvoday Hindustan’, an event organised by HT media group’s Hindi daily Hindustan in Ranchi, Shah reiterated the need for the NRC to detect illegal aliens in the country.

“Can an Indian go and live illegally in US, UK, Russia? No, then how can other nationals reside in India without legal documentation? That’s why I believe National Register of Citizens (NRC) should be implemented all over the country,” he said.

Assam is the only state in India to have the NRC after the exercise was concluded in August 31. Shah underlined that it was not the Assam Register of Citizens.

“We will extend NRC to the rest of the country and create a national register of citizens. There should be a list of all citizens of the country. It is NRC and not Assam Register of Citizens,” the minister said.

Shah had been a vocal supporter of the NRC in Assam to detect illegal foreigners and had said more than once that infiltrators were like termites that were destroying the country and should be thrown out.

The BJP had backed the NRC exercise in Assam until just before the final list was published which excluded 1.9 million people, many of them Bengali Hindus.

Earlier this month, Shah in his first visit to the Northeast after the publication of the NRC had said the government would bring in the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) once again after it lapsed in February following the government’s failure to table it in the Rajya Sabha. The Bill which seeks to make the process of acquiring Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan easier had triggered a firestorm of protests in the Northeast.

Shah had assured state governments in the region that the enactment of the CAB will not affect existing special provisions for them after Meghalaya chief minister Conrad Sangma voiced concern on the proposed legislation.