Cong team to visit NE to help draw strategy on NRC, citizenship bill

NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi has deputed a sixmember team to tour northeastern states to take feedback from the ground on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Bill in order to formulate the party’s stand on the issues.

The team, including senior leaders Mukul Wasnik, Jairam Ramesh, Jitendra Singh and Manickam Tagore, will start its tour from Imphal, Manipur, on Sunday.

Mohammad Ali Khan and Ranajit Mukherjee are the other two members of the team.

A Congress leader familiar with the developments said the group, comprising leaders who are not from the North East, was constituted as Sonia Gandhi is keen to clear the confusion on the two issues within party ranks.

Different state party units and the leadership at the national level have taken difference stances on the issue. Several Congress units in the region are yet to firm up their stand. Many have opposed the Bill, with the exception of Tripura and some sections in Assam.

“The Congress president has not been satisfied with the responses of the party leaders on the twin issues and hence has sought feedback from the ground,” the leader cited above said.

In Assam, where the exercise was initiated by the Congress under the then chief minister Tarun Gogoi in 2010 as a pilot project in Barpeta and Kamrup Rural, differing voices have emerged.

While Gogoi has rejected the present NRC, some of his party colleagues, such as Lok Sabha member Abdul Khaleque, have welcomed it.

Similarly, the Congress units in Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh have supported the NRC but the former president of its Tripura unit, Pradyot Debb Barman, quit the party, claiming that he was asked to withdraw his plea filed in the Supreme Court asking for a similar exercise in his state.

The final National Register of Citizens was published on August 31. Of Assam’s 33 million residents, who were asked to prove their citizenship, names of about 1.9 million were excluded. These names will now be referred to Foreigners’ Tribunals.

The Congress’s opposition to the NRC exercise had prompted the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to claim that the grand old party was soft on illegal, mainly Bangladeshi, immigrants.

The BJP also promised a legislative route for those whose names had wrongfully been excluded from the list, in the form of an altered Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB).

The altered legislation will also be on the agenda of the newly-constituted team.

The members have been tasked to find an acceptable position on both issues keeping in mind the sensitivity of the positions of people of all the states in the region, the leader quoted above said.

The team will submit its report to Sonia Gandhi within 10 days.

The party had earlier formed a committee to deliberate on the issue. Apart from Sonia, the panel comprised former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ex-party chief Rahul Gandhi, senior leaders Ahmed Patel, AK Antony, Kapil Sibal, KC Venugopal, Luizinho Falerio, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhary, Lal Thanhawla, Mukul Sangma, Sushmita Dev, Ripun Bora, Gaurav Gogoi, Kewekhape Therie and Pijus Kanti Biswas.

PATNA: The Janata Dal (United) led by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has set its eyes on the upcoming Jharkhand and Delhi assembly polls which could be critical to its efforts of being declared a national party.

The elections to the 81-member Jharkhand assembly will be held in five phases beginning November 30; Delhi will go to polls early next year.

After assuming charge for the second consecutive term as the party’s national president in Delhi, Kumar, on Wednesday made a strong pitch towards realizing the target at the earliest.

“My priority as the party president is to expand its base in other states including Jharkhand, Delhi and the north-east to get national party status for the JD-U,” he said.

According to the criteria set by the Election Commission of India (ECI), a national party needs to get at least 6% of the votes across a minimum of four states, or 2% of the total seats in the Lok Sabha from at least three states, or it should be recognised as a state party in at least four states.

At present, there are six recognized national parties in India — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Communist Party of India (CPI)