India Tomorrow

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 3—Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), India’s biggest socio-religious organization, has said that the BJP is trying to politicise the National Register of Citizens(NRC) issue of Assam to polarize the people on communal lines and gain political mileage all over the country. JIH also declared to provide legal help to all those left out of NRC final list.

Addressing mediapersons at its headquarters here on Tuesday, JIH leaders said that NRC issue was an ethnic issue. "It was never a Hindu-Muslim issue. But BJP has made it a political issue for political gains during elections’’, said JIH leaders.

They said, "Even the BJP, Congress and Assamese regional parties are opposing the NRC result. But the fascist forces are trying to communalise the NRC issue’’.

Referring to about two million people likely to be rendered "stateless’’, they said that it was "damaging India’s image in international community’’. They said that JIH would offer all possible legal aid to those who had been left out of NRC final list to ensure that their cases were cleared by the Foreign Tribunal(FT). They said they would help these persons to fight legal battle up to the Supreme Court.

Stating that under the existing laws, anyone staying in India for 12 years  was eligible for Indian citizenship, they wondered "how can the descendants of those living for generations in India be deprived of their citizenship and made stateless. We don’t want stateless people in India’’, JIH leaders said.

They said that almost all of those excluded from final NRC list were genuine citizens but could not produce proper evidence as Assam was frequently ravaged by floods and natural calamities in which they might have lost their documents. During floods, the first effort was to save life and nobody would bother about collecting valuables and documents. Moreover, a large number of people living in rural and backward areas were not aware about keeping documents and that was why they were  not able to produce documents required for NRC. "But this does not mean they are not citizens of this country’’, they said.

A large number of people left out of NRC, they said, were due to minor inaccuracies in their names.

"We appeal the justice-loving people of India to help the people of Assam’’,  JIH urged.

Opposing the extending of NRC to other parts of the country, JIH leaders advised the Central government to focus on "core issues of welfare and development’’.

Expressing concern over the economic slowdown resulting into huge problem of unemployment all over the country, they said that the BJP-led Central government was trying to divert attention of people from basic issues facing the country to emotional and communal issues that might benefit them in elections.

They said that Gross Domestic Product(DGP) had come down to lowest ever of 2.5 per cent in the last two decades and US dollar vs Indian Rupee rates had also fallen to the lowest figure, indicating the state of economy of the country. There was industrial lockdown and more than 3.5 lakh employees had lost jobs in automobile sector alone. Export growth had gone down. The banking industry continued to be plagued down by  NPAs and NBFCs were in crisis. All these developments were having cascading effect on the industry as a whole, resulting into total economic slowdown in the country. "This is a very serious situation but the government is not accepting it’’, they pointed out.

JIH leaders felt that interest-based banking system and a stock market with speculative financial instruments were causing these economic crises again and again. They suggested to go for a paradigm shift  towards ethical and interestless banking to boost investments and take the country out of the financial quagmire in which it had fallen now.

Those who addressed media included JIH vice-president Syed Mohammed Jafar, secretaries Malik Motasim Khan and S. Ameenul Hasan and assistant media secretary Arshad Sheikh.