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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Bureaucratic Anomalies Put Assam's 'Doubtful Voters' in a Precarious Position -Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty

Bureaucratic Anomalies Put Assam's 'Doubtful Voters' in a Precarious Position -Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty

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published Published on Jul 25, 2018   modified Modified on Jul 25, 2018
-TheWire.in

With the final draft NRC expected soon, there is still no visible mechanism in place for the EC to continuously update its list based on the judgements by tribunals clearing 'D voters'.

Guwahati:
Shah Alam Bhuyan, an assistant inspector in the Assam police, reminded me of a stark truth about policemen on election duty: “We just help others vote, most of us can’t vote because we are usually on election duty away from where our constituency is.”

That he hasn’t been able to vote for many terms doesn’t quite bother him. “If voting in an election is an important national duty, so is ensuring that elections go off well. That’s why I have never complained,” the 53-year-old said.

But during the 2011 assembly elections in Assam, he got a chance to go home on voting day. He remembered thinking that he “must vote”. However, what awaited him at the polling booth in Rowmari village in the state’s Barpeta district was not just a rude shock, but a revelation about how arbitrarily the state Election Commission must have marked many voters of the state as ‘D’, or ‘Doubtful’ . A doubtful voter can’t vote because his Indian citizenship is under suspicion. Exclusive to Assam, the EC introduced the category in 1997 upon being faced with an unending “anti-immigration” issue, one which had led to the Assam Accord in 1985 as per which an exclusive citizenship cut-off date was also introduced for the state (March 25, 1971).

That day in 2011, Bhuyan was told by the polling officer that the EC had marked him a D voter in 1997.

“I came back home very disappointed and confused about what basis I had been made a D voter on. Perhaps it was because I am possibly the only Bhuyan in a village full of people with surnames like Ali and Ahmed. Maybe someone thought ‘who is this Bhuyan here’ and ‘he must be a Bangladeshi’. I am a native of Nagaon district. Though we are Muslims, we never dropped our original surname. You will find many Muslim Bhuyan in the Nagaon area. Rowmari is my wife’s village. My family moved here because she works here,” Bhuyan said.

Eventually, he left for work in Guwahati. “I didn’t get time to pursue my case. After all, I have been on security duty for the state chief minister – from Tarun Gogoi’s time to Sarbananda Sonowal. But what I did then was request an MLA to ask a question about my D voter status in the assembly. It prompted the then chief minister Gogoi to respond, saying, ‘It must be a mistake. It will be corrected.’”

The years rolled by. As usual, Bhuyan didn’t get a chance to go home for the 2014 Lok Sabha and the 2016 assembly polls to check on any change in his voter status as promised, even though his wife “kept pestering” him “to treat the matter seriously as the NRC (National Register of Citizens) update process had begun in the state by then to determine one’s citizenship status”.

“Since I barely had any free time, she took it upon herself to pursue it; she took my documents to the local police station in early 2017. They laughed, saying how can he be a D voter, and told her not to worry. The usual process of clearing my name began. The local Border Police unit sent a notice and thereafter I was to hire a lawyer to fight my case in the foreigners’ tribunal to prove my Indian citizenship by presenting the relevant documents on a given date. As expected, I was cleared by the tribunal on March 28, 2017. There was a sigh of relief in my family,” he said.

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TheWire.in, 24 July, 2018, https://thewire.in/rights/assam-doubtful-voters-citizenship-nrc


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