A 56-year-old BJP leader with roots in Rajasthan has been marked a ‘foreigner’ after his name was excluded from the draft list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) being updated in Assam.
Members of Pawan Kumar Rathi’s family were surprised when his name figured among 1.02 lakh people filtered out of the draft NRC published in July 2018 and published in an additional exclusion list on June 26.
The Rathis had settled down in southern Assam’s Silchar town from Bikaner district of Rajasthan before Independence. “The youngest of four siblings, I was born in Silchar in 1963. So this notice from the NRC authorities on July 1 was shocking,” he said.
A local booth president of the BJP who had contested the Silchar civic polls on the party ticket, Mr. Rathi was in New Delhi when members of his family informed him about the notice saying he was a “declared foreigner”.
“I went to our ancestral home in Bikaner’s Kalu, collected copies of all documents I could find, had them signed by the village panchayats and returned on July 5 to appear for the hearing at the local NRC office the day after,” he told The Hindu on phone.
The panchayat leaders wondered how a man from the Marwari community could possibly be a foreigner. “This should not have happened since I had submitted some 40 documents including copies of my passport, Aadhaar card and other documents. The NRC officials said there was some kind of mistake. Hope they rectify it,” he said.
None of the other members of his family are in the excluded list.
Mr. Rathi’s family had enquired at the office of the Assam Police’s border wing but found there was no ‘foreigner’ case against him. A person is declared foreigner by a Foreigners’ Tribunal after the border wing makes a case against him or her on suspicion of being a non-citizen.
The NRC officials said Mr. Rathi’s case could have been that of local authorities in Rajasthan not verifying his documents in time. “We sent the papers of all applications from other States to the authorities in places from where them have come. In several cases, officials there have not replied,” an official said, declining to be quoted because of a Supreme Court gag order.
The Supreme Court is monitoring the NRC exercise whose deadline is July 31.
