More than 5,500 people have endorsed an online petition with a request to Chief Ministers of all states to reject National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which the Centre plans to update across the country.
The campaign is carried out on Change.org, a community welfare campaign portal by Peaceful People Action Solidarity Group says the exercise carries the threat of being misused for racial and religious profiling of citizens.
"The implementation of the NRC in Assam has been a failed exercise. It was traumatic and expensive for everyone involved, more so for the underprivileged; they had to sell their meagre assets like auto-rickshaws, livestock and orchards, mortgaged their lands to obtain documents, and many of those who were unable to produce the required documents (to prove citizenship) were put in detention centres, where the conditions are so dire that several adults and children have died," says the concept note of the petition while requesting all chief ministers and Chief Justice of India to reject the exercise.
It says the government was planning to prepare the country-wide NRC with the information to be furnished during the NPR. "The NPR can be an extremely traumatic experience especially for the country’s disadvantaged including the poor, minorities, women, Adivasis, homeless, and transgender people, etc. People will be forced to go through enormous hardship to prove that they are citizens in the midst of the worst economic crisis in India.
The petition comes amid protests against NRC and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 that seeks to allow "persecuted" non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan till December 2014 to apply for Indian citizenship.
Congress to scrap CAA:
President of Assam Pradesh Committee and Rajya Sabha member, Ripun Bora on Sunday said Congress would scrap the CAA once it comes back to power at the Centre. Bora said those to benefit from the amended act would also lose their citizenships if Congress regains power. Congress, which is also part of the anti-CAA protests, is in favour of solving Assam's long foreigner problem with March 24, 1971, as the cut-off as decided in the Assam Accord of 1985. The accord was signed during Rajiv Gandhi's tenure after a six-year-long anti-foreigners movement in Assam.