Guwahati: The former state coordinator of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) Prateek Hajela has been charged with antinational act for leading the updating and publication of the controversial document under the supervision of the Supreme Court to facilitate the entry of names of ineligible persons as Indian citizens in the document.
The NRC authority has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court seeking a complete and time-bound re-verification of the published NRC on the grounds that substantial anomalies were committed in preparing the document.
Meanwhile, the state’s BJP-led government has requested re-verification of 20% of data in districts bordering Bangladesh and 10% of data in interior districts.
Notably, Prateek Hajela began the process of amending the 1951 NRC in 2015, and the complete list was published in August 2019. The final list contains the names of 3,11,21,004 people and excludes the names of 19,06,657 people.
According to the FIR, despite the Supreme Court of India’s mandate for an error-free NRC, the then state coordinator Prateek Hajela may have purposefully avoided the mandatory quality check by ordering the use of software that prevented quality check and facilitated the entry of names of ineligible persons into the NRC, which could be considered an anti-national act endangering national security.
A few additional officials and data input operators are also listed in the FIR as having “conspired” with Hajela.