“Officially cut-off date for detecting foreigners in Assam is 1971. The Assam government inked the agreement where 1971 was accepted as the base year,” Sarma told reporters on Saturday.
“However, as a BJP party, I personally want to pursue a package where it wants delimitation of constituencies, implementation of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and cut-off date for determination of foreigners must be 1951.”
According to the Assam Accord, signed after a six-year anti-foreigners’ movement, led by AASU, the cut-off date for detecting foreigners in Assam is March 24, 1971. AASU led the movement from 1979-1985.
A constitution bench of the Supreme Court has observed that it will examine the constitutional validity of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act before looking into deeper citizenship matters pertaining to Assam. Under this section, people who entered India between January 1, 1966, and March 25, 1971, and have been living in Assam, will be allowed to register themselves as citizens.
Last month, the Election Commission announced the delimitation exercise of assembly and parliamentary constituencies in Assam using the 2001 census figures. The state government has decided to merge four new districts with respective original undivided districts.
Under the provisions of Delimitation Act, 1972, the last delimitation of constituencies in the State of Assam was done on the basis of census figures, 1971 by the then Delimitation Commission in 1976.National Register of Citizens (NRC) is an exercise to weed out illegal immigrants and is monitored by the Supreme Court. Around 3.30 crore people had applied for inclusion in the NRC, but the names of nearly 40 lakhs of them were excluded in the draft NRC published on July 30, 2018.
The supplementary NRC list had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry and left out over 1.9 million people.
Assam had witnessed violent protests in 2019 and early 2020 after Parliament passed the CAA, which makes minority communities such as Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan eligible to apply for Indian citizenship. Five people were killed in the protests.
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