Tripura royals support NRC

GUWAHATI: Tripura’s royal family on Wednesday extended its support in favour of having the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state, which has given a tremendous push to the growing demand for an Assam-like exercise in the fourth state in the region that shares its border with Bangladesh.
The state’s royal scion Pradyot Bikram Manikya Debbarma announced that “instead of staging dharna and protest in the street” he was taking the “legal” route in the interest of the people and the nation.
In a statement released on his official Facebook page, he said, “Will be ‘OFFICIALLY’ filing my affidavit in the Supreme Court for implementation of NRC in our state of Tripura this week.”
He added that former Union minister Salman Khurshid will represent him in the Supreme Court. “The details of the matter will be made public by me for transparency. To all those Doubting Thomases please realise – I will always put our peoples’ interest before any political gain. Those people who believe in holding stirs and protest on NRC my humble advise is ‘Go to court or join me in this writ petition’ and don’t waste time doing dharnas to get people's votes if you are really serious about this issue”.
A three-judge bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and KM Joseph on Monday in a PIL by a non-political organization, the Tripura People’s Front, and two persons from the indigenous tribal community of Tripura sought responses from the Centre and the Election Commission about undertaking an exercise to create NRC for Tripura, like the one in Assam.
The petitioners submitted that Tripura’s demography lies completely altered by the “uncontrolled influx” of immigrants from Bangladesh over the past five decades. The petitioners have specifically submitted before the court that the NRC in Tripura should be based on the 1948 cut-off date set by the Constitution and not the March 24, 1971 date, taken as the cut-off for updating the Assam NRC.
The ruling BJP in Tripura is opposing an NRC but its ally IPFT wants it to be done. The opposition CPM and Congress have also welcomed the SC’s order.
The NRC is unique to Assam after the electoral roll of 1951 was converted into the first register of names of citizens to detect the unaccounted number of illegal migrants from Bangladesh settled in the state, believed to be in several lakh at that point of time.
Assam published the NRC draft on July 30 where over 40 lakh names did not figure. These excluded people are now going through a second attempt to claim citizenship but the whole exercise that was started in 2015 has caught the nation’s attention, particularly neighouring states of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura.