Prateek Hajela: From the face of the NRC to ‘anti-national’ 

FIR filed against IAS officer who was transferred to his home State after draft NRC was published in 2019 

Prateek Hajela was the face of the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) of 1951 in Assam for six years till November 2019. Less than three years later, this 1995-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre has been tagged an anti-national.

Hitesh Dev Sarma, Mr. Hajela’s successor as the State NRC Coordinator, had on May 19 lodged a first information report (FIR) with the Criminal Investigation Department seeking action against his predecessor for knowingly disobeying the law, intentionally avoiding mandatory quality checks in the process of updating the NRC and allowing declared foreigners, doubtful voters and their descendants to enlist their names.

The FIR said Mr. Hajela “intentionally avoided re-verification of 64,247 persons despite a complaint” and his act should be treated as “treason for doing an activity which is likely to threaten national security”.

This was not the first case against Mr. Hajela since the Supreme Court, which monitored the NRC exercise from December 2014, transferred him to his home State Madhya Pradesh in November 2019. The apex court did not give any reason but it was believed that he, given watertight security earlier, was under pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government in Assam for handling the “expensive” NRC exercise “only to produce a faulty list of citizens that left out genuine Indians and included illegal immigrants”.

The Assam NRC exercise cost more than ₹1,600 crore, and indigenous groups were unhappy that the number of “people with suspicious nationality” was “trimmed” from 41 lakh in the draft citizens’ list of July 2018 to 19.06 lakh in the complete draft published on August 31, 2019. There was a total of 3.3 crore applicants.

The indigenous groups want all pre-1971 settlers, perceived to be close to 40 lakh, excluded while the BJP wants the left-out Hindus included and more Muslims excluded from the NRC. While the non-indigenous Hindus are a sizeable vote bank for the BJP, they are the key to the party’s goal of implementing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 that seeks to grant fast-tracked citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who took refuge in India by December 31, 2014.