The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and 30 like-minded organisations on Friday blamed the Assam government for not making suo motu verification of the names of suspected Bangladeshis whose names have allegedly been included in the updated draft National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The organisations said the standard operating procedure (SOP) approved by the Supreme Court in November last year has the provision of such suo motu verification by district registrar of citizen registration (DRCR) and local registrar of citizen registration (LRCR).

The provision in the SOP has been inserted from Section 4 (3) of The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. The SOP says, “The LRCR may at any time before the final publication of NRC in the state of Assam may cause or direct to cause verification of names already in the final draft NRC if considered necessary. The verification may be carried out by LRCR or any other officer authorised by the DRCR.”

“The state government should have conducted verification by using Section 4(3). We are surprised to see that instead of doing that chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal is asking why the organisations have not filed objections,” AASU adviser Samujjal Bhattacharjya said.

Objection is a process whereby a person can object to inclusion of another person’s name in the draft NRC if he has doubts about the nationality of that person. The last date of filing claims and objections is December 15.

AASU and the 30 organisations had a meeting here on Friday where they discussed problems reportedly being faced by people in filing objections. They said the problem was owing to refusal of the NRC authority to take objection against a person in NRC Seva Kendras (NSK) other than the one where the person had applied for inclusion of his name. They said it was not secure for someone to file objection against a suspected Bang-ladeshi in an area where he and many others like him live.

The organisations demanded the Centre, the Assam government and the NRC authorities to make the provision of filing objections in the district headquarters. The AASU had written with the same request to the Supreme Court-constituted three-member judges’ committee on Thursday.

AASU general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi said they had also raised the matter before the Union home ministry earlier while it was preparing the SOP with NRC Assam state coordinator Prateek Hajela. But their demand was not accommodated in the SOP.

AASU president Dipanka Kumar Nath said the NRC must be a faultless one which will not have the name of any foreigner who has entered the state after midnight of March 24, 1971, and with all those who were in the state before that.