Assam NRC chief says his SC-appointed predecessor Prateek Hajela is anti-national, moves CID

Assam coordinator of National Register of Citizens or NRC Hitesh Dev Sarma has lodged a complaint with the CID against his predecessor, Prateek Hajela, and others accusing them of committing “anti-national” and criminal activities while updating the register.

In his complaint, Sarma has alleged anomalies in Family Tree Verification and other document verification processes. Family Trees were drawn to establish legacy data accurately during the updating process of the citizenship document. Sarma has alleged that no order for quality check during the Family Tree Matching phase was issued by Hajela.

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The complainant said the software used in the process also had no scope for quality checks, thus “giving the verifying officers a free hand to upload wrong results to fulfil their vested interests”.

Sarma said Prateek Hajela might have intentionally avoided the mandatory quality checks by ordering the use of such a software and “facilitated entry of names of ineligible persons into the NRC which can be seen as an anti-national act affecting national security”

The CID is, however, yet to register an FIR against those being accused who included several officers and data entry operators associated with the process.

The NRC, an official record of Indian citizens living in Assam, was updated under the supervision of the Supreme Court and released on August 31 in 2019, leaving out more than 19 lakh applicants.

However, it has not been notified by the Registrar General of India.

Hajela, a 1995 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, had been appointed by the apex court as the NRC state coordinator in 2013. He was released from the charge in November 2019, and the court ordered his transfer from Assam to his home state Madhya Pradesh.