Will resolve D voters issue related in six months: Assam CM

Silchar: Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Wednesday said that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre and in the state would solve the ‘D voters’ or doubtful citizenship issue, especially for Bengali-speaking Hindus in the next six months.

D voters, or doubtful voters in Assam are those who have been disenfranchised due to doubts about their citizenship. According to the state government, there are 96,987 D voters in the state as of February this year.

Attending a public rally in Silchar, Sarma said, “I never made this claim earlier but now I can say this because all the necessary discussions have been completed. I can assure you, all the problems faced by the Bengali Hindus, including D voters will be solved in the next six months.”

It can be mentioned that Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 2014 general election visited the Barak Valley and assured that no genuine Indian would suffer due to the D-voters issues if he came to power.

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Earlier this year Sarma had said that over 96,000 people in the state have been marked as ‘doubtful’ (D) voters and more than 159,000 have been declared as ‘foreigners’ in the state so far.

Sarma in an interview last month said that around 500,000 Bengali-speaking Hindus were excluded from the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and many of them have adequate documents, so they do not require Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to prove their identity.

The Barak Valley part of Assam has around a population of 4.5 million and according to the election commission’s records, a large part of the population is Bengali-speaking.

Sarma on Wednesday said that their government has worked on protecting the rights of linguistic communities like Manipuri and they respect the Bengali language as well.

“The Bengali language has a rich legacy and we are committed to protecting the Bengali culture. We’ll solve all the issues faced by the Bengali Hindus,” he added.

After the Election Commission’s delimitation process last year, the Silchar Lok Sabha seat in Barak Valley became reserved for Scheduled Caste (SC) and the Karimganj seat, which was SC reserved since independence and during delimitation, became an independent seat.

Sarma on Wednesday said that delimitation has made BJP’s way to win both the seats in Barak Valley easier and the margin of win will be larger than 2019 general elections.

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“The 2019 election was tough for us but our candidates in Barak Valley won. This year’s election is much easier because of Delimitation. Our candidate in Silchar will win by a margin of 2.5 lakhs while in Karimganj, we’ll be ahead by one lakh votes,” he said.

Assam is going to polls in three phases, starting from April 19. The pollings in the two seats in Barak Valley are scheduled for April 26. Sarma said that many star campaigners would visit Assam and this part of the state in the upcoming weeks.

“Every party should bring their popular campaigners here because elections are a celebration of democracy. For us, Narendra Modi’s name and his works are the biggest campaigners. We will go to every household with Modi’s name, even to house former MP Sushmita Dev’s house,” he said.

Sarma said that he is sad because one of the most efficient ministers of his cabinet, Parimal Suklabaidya, is going to parliament but he is happy that such an honest man will be representing Assam in parliament.

He praised Rajdeep Roy who won the 2019 election from Silchar beating Congress candidate Sushmita Dev. “When the opposition brought a no-confidence motion and Modi was facing it, I saw Rajdeep taking the strongest stand. As a resident of Assam, I felt so proud of him,” Sarma said.

After the announcement of the CAA rules, Roy said that his family is a victim of partition and religious persecution in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and by nominating a member of such a family as an MP, the BJP showed its intention to protect the migrated Hindu Bengalis.