Congress leader P Chidambaram on Thursday said that the United Progressive Alliance introduced the National Population Register in 2010 with an emphasis on “residency” and not “citizenship”. He was responding to a purported video by the Bharatiya Janata Party which showed the former Congress-led government launching the National Population Register.
“I am happy that the BJP has released a video clip of the launch of NPR in 2010,” Chidambaram tweeted. “Please listen to the video. We were enumerating the ‘usual residents’ of the country. The emphasis is on residency not citizenship.”
“Every usual resident was to be enumerated irrespective of his or her religion or place of birth,” the former finance minister added. “The NPR aided the preparation of the Census of 2011. There was no mention of NRC [National Register of Citizens].”
Chidambaram said that in contrast, the BJP has a much larger and more sinister agenda. He said this is the reason the National Population Register that the Union Cabinet approved on Tuesday is very dangerous and different “in terms of the text as well as the context of NPR 2010”.
“If the BJP’s motives are bonafide, let the government unconditionally state that they support the NPR form and design of 2010 and have no intention of linking it to the controversial NRC,” Chidambaram concluded.
The Union Cabinet had on Tuesday approved funds of over Rs 3,900 crore to update the National Population Register. This register, which is linked to the census and is a list of “usual residents” in the country, is described by the Census of India as “the first step towards the creation of a National Register of Citizens”. However, Union minister Prakash Javadekar said no document or biometric data is required for the register and it will be based on self-declarations.
Later in the day, Union Home Minister Amit Shah denied in an interview that there was any link between the National Population Register and the NRC. “There is no need to debate this [pan-India NRC] as there is no discussion on it right now, Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi was right, there is no discussion on it yet either in the Cabinet or Parliament,” he said.
The home minister claimed that there was a difference between the two registers and that their procedures were not linked, adding that the data in the NPR cannot be used for the NRC. “NPR is the register of population on the basis of which schemes are made,” he said. “NRC asks people on what basis they are the citizens of the country.”
The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to separate undocumented immigrants living in India from genuine Indian citizens. It was carried out in Assam earlier this year, and excluded 19 lakh people.
There have been massive protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens throughout the country over the last two weeks. At least 25 people have died in the protests, including 18 in Uttar Pradesh alone.
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