'Vague' reasons baffle families ....Farmer, whose family figured in first NRC draft, finds all names missing in second

Rejected NRC applicants at Hatishulapam in Kamrup district. Picture by Kulendu Kalita

Sumir Karmakar, TT, Aug 13, 2018, Hatishulapam (Kamrup): Samsul Hoque was shocked when he received the letter saying his family of seven could not be included in the draft National Register for Citizens as a case was pending against "a family member" in a foreigners tribunal.

Hoque says the letter did not give the case number, or say which among the state's 100 foreigners tribunals it was registered with - it did not even identify which family member had been so implicated.

"Neither had I received a notice nor had police informed me, as is normally done if a case is registered with a foreigners tribunal," the farmer told The Telegraph.

"How can we find out against whom the case was registered without the case number or any other details?"

Most of the 40 lakh-odd applicants missing from the NRC's final draft are yet to know why they have been excluded. The NRC seva kendras were to begin explaining the reasons individually from August 7 but there have been three serial postponements - to August 10, August 13 and now August 20.

The only people who have been sent written reasons for their exclusion are those who had figured on the first draft, released on December 31, but are missing from the July 30 final draft. Four of Hoque's family were on the first draft but none are on the final draft.

When Hoque had heard of this correspondent's arrival here, he had rushed from his home in neighbouring Karaibeel - after grabbing a printout of the electoral rolls and some other documents - on the mistaken notion that an NRC official had turned up.

The applications of Ali Ahmed's family too were rejected because the surname of Ali's grandfather - as spelled in the 1951 NRC, which he had submitted as legacy data - did not match that on a land document. Many others suffered because of discrepancies between their surnames and their ancestors'.

"In Muslim society, a son often uses a different surname from his father's. Such mismatches during the family-tree verification led to exclusion from the NRC," said Akram Hussain, president of the Hatishulapam gram panchayat.

Some 4,866 of the 16,931 applications from five villages - Hatishulapam, Hatishula Gaon, Bhulukamari, Laruajan and Karaibeel - about 60km west of Guwahati, have been rejected. That is a 28.7 per cent rejection rate, more than double the state average of 12.2 per cent.

At least 1,000 of those excluded had furnished birth certificates, which seem to have been rejected.

Hussain said that 1,202 of the 4,866 rejected applications were from married women who had submitted panchayat certificates.

"Illiterate married women with no birth, marriage or school certificates can only furnish certificates issued by the panchayats as link documents (linking them to their pre-1971 ancestors)," he said.

Hussain explained why few people in the area had birth certificates: "A few years ago there was no hospital here and the Gobardhana Hospital, 20km away, was the only option. Most villagers here did not go for institutional delivery as the roads were very poor; so their children don't have birth certificates."

He added: "There are no Bangladeshis in our villages. Our forefathers had settled here before the Partition. The mosque, set up in 1929, and the school, established in 1920, are proof of that."