Assam’s National Register of Citizens coordinator Prateek Hajela has claimed that “political posturing” was responsible for the opposition to the exclusion of five of the 15 verification documents. On September 19, the Supreme Court had asked Hajela to file a report on the feasibility of using the five excluded documents as part of the registry’s verification process.
The state coordinator claimed that people were misusing the documents to help “include illegal migrants” that was leading to errors in the list. In his report dated October 4, and made available to stakeholders on Thursday, Hajela said, “For an error-free National Register of Citizens, there should be a paradigm shift from ‘No genuine citizen should be left out’ to ‘no ineligible person should be included’.”