National Register of Citizens

This article is about the system for all of India. For the system implemented in Assam, see National Register of Citizens for Assam.

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is meant to be a register of all Indian citizens whose creation was mandated by the 2003 amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955. Its purpose is to document all the legal citizens of India so that the illegal immigrants can be identified and deported.[1][2] It has been implemented for the state of Assam starting in 2013–2014.[3] The Government of India announced plans to implement it for the rest of the country in 2021,[4] but it has not yet been implemented.

In 2019, the Government passed another amendment (referred to as "CAA 2019" or "CAA"), which promised an accelerated naturalisation process for immigrants of persecuted Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Parsi and Jain religious minority communities of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was widely seen as a way to exempt non-Muslims that might fail the criteria for inclusion in NRC, though Jews and Baha'is also falls in to this category.

  1. ^ Assam final NRC list released: 19,06,657 people excluded, 3.11 crore make it to citizenship list, India Today, 31 August 2019.
  2. ^ Ravi Agrawal, Kathryn Salam, India Is Betraying Its Founding Fathers, Foreign Policy, 17 December 2019.
  3. ^ Gupta, Beyond the poll rhetoric 2019.
  4. ^ "As Anti-CAA Pressure Builds, BJP Govt Goes Discernibly on the Backfoot". The Wire. 21 December 2019. Archived from the original on 21 December 2019.