A group of more than 100 retired civil servants issued an open letter on Thursday urging people to agree to withdraw the recent amendments to the Citizenship Act and cancel the plan for the creation of the National Register of Citizens.
Retired civil servants who came together under the aegis of the Constitutional Conduct Group also countered the government’s latest effort to distribute the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens.
“Three issues are linked,” it said in the open letter that is “designed to familiarize people with the facts” and emphasizes “these measures need to be completely opposed”.
The open letter names 106 retired civil servants, one-fourth of whom retired as secretaries to the central government. It included three former foreign secretaries, Shyam Saran, Shiv Shankar Menon, and Sujatha Singh, former Ambassador of India to the UK Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, former telecom regulator Rahul Khullar, former head of the top Asian body, Meeran C. Borwankar, former executive officer of Asian Development Bank Huh. Director PK Lahiri, and former Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekhar.
Both NPR and NRC are unnecessary and futile exercises, with retired bureaucrats predicting that this would cause hardship to the public and better spending on schemes benefiting the poor.
The group also warned that they would constitute an attack on citizens’ right to privacy, as a lot of information, including Aadhaar, mobile numbers, and voter ID cards, would be listed in a document with scope for misuse.
He asked the government to withdraw the Foreign (Tribunal) Amendment Order, 2019, which empowers district magistrates to set up tribunals and is a precursor to widespread practice to identify “illegal migrants”.
“The experience with the tribunals of foreigners in Assam has been to keep it blunt, painful for those who receive it. The open letter stated that after collecting the documents and responding to objections to their citizenship claims, “suspicious citizens” have also had to contend with these tribunals, whose composition and functioning was highly discretionary and arbitrary.
