No Indian national will be excluded from NRC draft, says Rajnath Singh; Union minister lauds development work in North East

New Delhi: Urging people to have no fret regarding the NRC draft, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday assured that no Indian national would be excluded from the list. “Every person living in the North East wants that there should be a list on who is a foreigner and who belongs to this country. That is why you have seen how Assam recently saw the NRC draft. There have been a few complaints regarding that too. But, whatever is happening is under the supervision of the Supreme Court,” Singh said at an event in the national capital. [caption id=“attachment_4735691” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Home Minister Rajnath Singh. News18[/caption] “I don’t want to talk in details about the problems, but I do want to assure you that whosoever is an Indian national will definitely be included in the NRC draft. Nobody should have any qualms regarding this,” he added. The first draft of NRC for Assam was released on the intervening night of 31 December, 2017 and 1 January, 2018 containing the name of 1.9 crore Assamese. The second and final draft, which was released on 30 July, included names of 2.89 crore people, out of 3.29 crore applicants in Assam, leaving out names of nearly 40 lakh people. NRC is a register containing names of Indian citizens, which was prepared for the only time in 1951 and is being updated for only Assam to weed out the illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, hailing the northeastern region, Rajnath said: “People say that Jammu and Kashmir is the ‘head’ of India and the North East states are the hands and shoulders of the country. However, I want to say that I consider the North East as a piece of our heart. There was a time when there was sense of alienation in the mindset of the people living in the North East. But when Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the prime minister, he said, ‘North East is a piece of our heart. We can’t dream of developing India by neglecting the North-East region’.” “Our prime minister (Narendra Modi) says that we want to reach the goal of ‘New India’ by 2022. Therefore, until the North East is developed and a new North East is made, till that time our goal of ‘New India’ cannot be reached. There has been a fast improvement in the law and order there. There is no dearth of talent among the youths of the North East. There are a lot of officers from the North East in Delhi Police. I want to tell all the students from the North East that wherever they face any kind of problem, they can directly get in touch with me,” he added.