Civil Rights Activists Condemn NPR as Part of Divisive RSS-BJP Agenda

Civil rights advocates said on Thursday that the National Population Register (NPR) is an attempt to further disenfranchise vulnerable persons and harm their privacy via monitoring. They called the push an NRC-like exercise that is part of the divisive goal of the RSS-BJP.

Addressing an online media conference in Mumbai on "Policing and Profiling the Citizens: How a Surreptitious NPR Database and Selective Surveys are Profiling Vulnerable Citizens, rights defender Teesta Setalvad raised concerns and said the NPR was a backdoor exercise to collect documented data on individuals that may thereafter be used by the State to declare their citizenship "doubtful".


Citizens for Justice and Peace, a civil rights organization led by Setalvad, arranged the press conference.

The NPR was first created in 2010 and was updated in 2015 by collecting data on every citizen of the nation.

Setalvad claimed that the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act will soon be put into effect as part of the Narendra Modi government's attempts to polarize voters ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The Act had previously been placed on hold due to Covid and widespread demonstrations throughout the nation.

The NPR, NRC, and CAA, she said, were all connected.

Amit Shah, the Union home minister, said last week that the CAA will be announced and put into effect before to the next general election.

Through the 2003 amendments to the Citizenship Act of 1955, the NPR became mandatory. Biometric information was gathered as part of the 2010 NPR and added to the Aadhaar database.

According to Setalvad, the 2003 Rules make no mention of the need for periodic NPRs; nonetheless, in 2015, Aadhaar, mobile, and ration card numbers were gathered, and fields like name, gender, date and place of birth, place of residence, and parents' and mothers' names were updated.

The NPR is currently being updated by the home ministry to reflect changes brought about by births, deaths, and migrations. This demonstrates unequivocally that it is a backdoor operation to gather official information on susceptible individuals, which the State may then use to question those citizens' citizenship," the speaker said.

A member of Calcutta's Lokvidya Jan Andolan, Abhijit Mitra, said it was dubious why the government was gathering biometric and demographic information on its inhabitants. "The goal of the entire exercise is to target minority communities and is not transparent."

He said that the home ministry's declaration that the 21 questions under the NPR were optional and that they constituted a danger to privacy, encouraging monitoring and greater disenfranchisement of persons via the NRC.

Javed Anand, an activist from Mumbai, said that the CAA-NPR-NRC was a part of the BJP-RSS plot to divide people along religious lines in order to win elections by drawing attention away from the actual problems, which include rising costs and the deplorable conditions of healthcare, education, and jobs.

They have been asserting that India should become a Hindu Rashtra. We are now seeing a concerning level of affiars across the nation. He said, "We read about goons throwing saffron flags on churches and mosques being destroyed every other day."

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Press Time staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.