New Delhi: On Tuesday, The Supreme Court slammed the Centre over the issue of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and accused the Union Home Ministry of coming up with ‘different stories’ to ‘destroy the process’. The top court’s rebuke came when it was hearing a plea by the Centre for the withdrawal of 167 companies of combined armed forces for two weeks from Assam. 

In its plea, the Union Home Ministry had sought the withdrawal of the specific number of armed forces as it required them to be deployed for the upcoming elections. However, the SC bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi rejected the petition, saying that the Centre was “not cooperating”. It added that it appeared that the home ministry’s entire effort was “to destroy the NRC process.” 

Meanwhile, following the Supreme Court's scathing observation over the issue, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that the government was committed to ensuring that the process is completed on deadline. In a video, Singh said, "We will meet the deadline in the Assam NRC draft process. No Indian will be excluded." 

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Earlier, the Union government also asked for the suspension of the NRC exercise, responding to which the Supreme Court said was “too much to ask for both.” The apex court also noted that the elections and the NRC process could be held simultaneously, Hindustan Times reported. “If you wanted the citizen register process to go on, there were 1001 ways to do so.”

The Election Commission was also asked by the Supreme Court to consider exempting a few state officers from the election duty so that the NRC process remains unhampered, the daily reported. 

The Centre had released the NRC draft on July 20 last year, which revealed that over 4 million of 32.9 million people in Assam had been left out of the final draft of the National Register of Citizens. Both the Centre and the Assam government had clarified that the NRC was on its draft stage only and those whose names had been left out of the list still had recourse available to get their names included. 

The last date to file claims and objections on the inclusion of names in the draft NRC was extended by the Supreme Court from December 15 to December 31, 2018. 

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