NRC not a new idea: CJI Gogoi
Assam’s development hit by ‘armchair commentators’: Gogoi
New Delhi: CJI Justice Ranjan Gogoi on Sunday hit out at “armchair detractors” and “social media” for questioning the Assam NRC, asserting that it was “neither a new nor a novel” idea but was aimed was aimed to update 1951 NRC and to identify the number of “illegal immigrants”.
The Chief Justice of India, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, on Sunday hit out at “armchair detractors” and “social media” for questioning the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC), asserting that it was “neither a new nor a novel” idea but was aimed to update 1951 NRC and to identify the number of “illegal immigrants.”
“The NRC is neither new nor a novel idea. It found expression as early as in the year 1951 and in the particular context of Assam, in 1985 following the Assam Accord. Infact, the current NRC is an attempt to update the 1951 NRC,” CJI Gogoi said while releasing a book
Post Colonial Assam 1947 to 2019 by an eminent Assam journalist Mrinal Talukdar.
Dwelling on the perspective of updating the NRC, CJI said, “This is an occasion to put things in proper perspective – the NRC as it will finally emerge is not a document of the moment – 19 lakhs or 40 lakhs is not the point. It is a base document for the future – kind of a reference document to determine future claims.” Pointing to the havoc that the speculation regarding the number of illegal immigrants was playing in Assam, the CJI Gogoi said that prior updating of NRC, the “whole discourse had been repeatedly fed with enormous amount of guesswork as to the number of illegal migrants, which in turn fuelled panic, fear and vicious cycles of lawlessness and violence.”
And the situation was worsened by callous reporting by few media outlets and there was an “urgent need to ascertain with some degree of certainty the number of illegal immigrants, which is what the current exercise of NRC attempted,” the CJI said, trying to clear some of the misgivings created by a section of armchair commentators and the social media.
The exercise of updating the NRC, the CJI said, was nothing but an attempt by which the stakeholders seek to remedy the “wrongs and omissions” of that turbulence, whose effects changed the courses of lives of not only individuals but of communities and cultures across the region.
Hitting out at the armchair commentators, CJI Gogoi said, “At this crossroad, we need to keep in mind that our national discourse has witnessed the emergence of armchair commentators who are not only far removed from ground realities, but also seek to present a highly distorted picture.”