India doesn't need NPR, CAA: Retired bureaucrats
January 09, 2020 21:02
Citing grave reservations about the constitutional validity of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, as many as 106 retired bureaucrats on Thursday wrote an open letter to people saying both the National Population Register and the National Register of Indian Citizens were "unnecessary and wasteful exercises", which will cause hardships to the public.
The former bureaucrats, including former Lieutenant Governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, the then cabinet secretary K M Chandrasekhar and former Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah urged fellow citizens to insist the Union government to repeal relevant sections of Citizenship Act, 1955, pertaining to the issue of national identity cards.
"We have our grave reservations about the Constitutional validity of the CAA provisions, which we also consider to be morally indefensible. We would like to emphasise that a statute that consciously excludes the Muslim religion from its purview is bound to give rise to apprehensions in what is a very large segment of India's population," said the letter, titled "India does not need the CAA-NPR-NRIC".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's statement at a public meeting in Delhi on December 22 that the CAA and the National Register of Indian Citizens are not linked contradicts the averments of his home minister (Amit Shah) on repeated occasions in various fora, it said.
"At a time when the economic situation in the country warrants the closest attention of the government, India can ill afford a situation where the citizenry and the government enter into confrontation on the roads," said the letter.
"Nor is it desirable to have a situation where the majority of State Governments are not inclined to implement the NPR/NRIC, leading to an impasse in centre-state relations, so crucial in a federal set up like India," it added.
Above all, it said, "We see a situation developing where India is in danger of losing international goodwill and alienating its immediate neighbours, with adverse consequences for the security set-up in the sub-continent".
The retired bureaucrats said there was no need for the NPR and the National Register of Indian Citizens.
"Our group of former civil servants, with many years of service in the public sphere, is firmly of the view that both the NPR and the NRIC are unnecessary and wasteful exercises, which will cause hardship to the public at large and will also entail public expenditure that is better spent on schemes benefiting the poor and disadvantaged sections of society," the letter said.
They also constitute an invasion of the citizens' right to privacy, since a lot of information, including Aadhaar, mobile numbers and voter IDs will be listed in a document, with scope for misuse, it said.
"We are apprehensive that the vast powers to include or exclude a person from the Local Register of Indian Citizens that is going to be vested in the bureaucracy at a fairly junior level has the scope to be employed in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner, subject to local pressures and to meet specific political objectives, not to mention the unbridled scope for large-scale corruption," said the letter. -- PTI
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