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Though NRC centre has offered him hope, Mamud Ali feels slighted
A Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) jawan in Assam has been served notice as a ‘D’, or doubtful, voter less than two months after retired soldier Mohammed Sanaullah was declared a foreigner.
The tag relegated Mamud Ali, 47, to the additional list of people excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) being updated in Assam. This list has 1.02 lakh names that had earlier passed scrutiny to be in the draft NRC published in July 2018.
D-voters are those who have been disenfranchised during electoral roll revision for their alleged lack of proper citizenship credentials with their cases pending in one of 100 Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs) across Assam. But the notice that Mr. Ali received was from the NRC in the Kamrup district service centre that processed the documents of his family. Mr. Ali is posted at an industrial unit in Bankura district of West Bengal. He took emergency leave and rushed back home in western Assam’s Dalagaon after a panchayat leader sent him the copy of the notice via WhatsApp.
“I was under the impression that FTs send the D-voter notice, but the one I received bore the stamp of the panchayat. Nevertheless, I reached the NRC centre on July 6 for a hearing where police and paramilitary personnel were also present. They checked my documents and said my case would be cleared,” he said. But the CISF jawan, about to complete 24 years in service, felt slighted by the ordeal he was put through. “It was as if my father Karamat Ali Sheikh’s school certificate of 1947 and the voters’ lists of the 1960s sporting his name have no value,” he said. The citizenship of none of his four surviving siblings and others linked to his father’s legacy data has been doubted.
“The CISF jawan’s case smacks of a conspiracy to make people D-voters. The NRC officials may now say they wrongly identified him as a D-voter, but are they authorised to detect doubtful voters,” asked Azizur Rahman, advisor of the All Assam Minority Students’ Union. Two days before Mr. Ali’s “date with doubt”, a woman named Ranu Samaddar received a D-voter notice from an FT in western Assam’s Nalbari district. This is the second such notice she has received from the Assam Police’s border wing since 2004.
