GUWAHATI, June 27 � The Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) today said the charges levelled against the Congress by Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, Lok Sabha member Bijoya Chakravorty and BJP State unit president Siddhartha Bhattacharyya are objectionable and baseless.
The APCC claimed that the electoral rolls prepared till 2014 were based on the 1971 electoral rolls. Some real situations, however, have arisen during the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It is now observed that the 12 documents that have been made mandatory for inclusion of the names of those people, whose names feature neither in the 1951 NRC nor in the electoral rolls prepared before March 25, 1971, are not available with many people, particularly those belonging to the tea garden communities and indigenous tribal groups.
These people cannot be denied their right to get their names included in the NRC. Therefore, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has placed a demand before the Centre to accept the electoral rolls of 2014 as an additional document for updating the NRC. This is not going to impede the NRC update process. The Congress is bound by a constitutional obligation to ensure that no name, of any genuine Indian citizen, is dropped from the NRC, it said.
However, the present process of updating the document will continue till a new directive comes from the Central government and the Supreme Court of India. But, if any foreign national�s name exists in the 2014 electoral rolls, the State government cannot be held responsible for that. For, the Election Commission of India prepares the electoral rolls at the instance of the Central government. The Centre is responsible for deleting the names of the foreign nationals from the electoral rolls, it maintained.
It further claimed that as the electoral rolls of the State were prepared taking 1971 as the base year, hence 3.50 lakh voters were identified as �D� voters at the very beginning. If the electoral rolls of 2014 and those prior to it had included the names of foreign nationals, then it is also a fact that Sarbananda Sonowal, Bijoya Chakravorty and the rest of the BJP Lok Sabha members were also elected on the votes of the foreign nationals. If they are so worried over the issue of foreign nationals, why have they not resigned from the Parliament, questioned the APCC.
