Guwahati, Kerala, September 01, 2019 (PPI-OT): Over 30 students from a college in Kerala were booked on Saturday for waving the Pakistani flag on the campus. The incident took place when the students belonging to the Muslim Students Front (MSF) were carrying out a procession as part of union elections on Perambra Silver College campus. Police in Kerala’s Kozhikode district filed a case against them for waving a giant Pakistan flag on the college campus.
The students were booked under the relevant IPC sections 143, 147, 153 and 149. Further proceedings will be carried out after verifying the identity of students involved in the incident. Reacting to the incidents, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed that terrorists had sneaked into the college and were trying to destabilise harmony in the state.
Meanwhile, almost two million people in northeast India – majority of them Muslims – were left facing statelessness on Saturday after they were excluded from a citizenship list aimed at weeding out “foreign infiltrators”, in a process the central government wants to replicate nationwide.
A total of 31.1 million people were included in a National Register of Citizens (NRC), but 1.9 million were deemed ineligible, according to an official statement. “31.1 million people now make up the final list, with 1.9 million excluded,” said Prateek Hajela, the coordinator of the state’s register. Any person who is not satisfied with the outcome of the claims and objections can file an appeal with the foreigners’ tribunals,” Hajela said in a statement, adding that everyone had received an adequate hearing.
Those excluded have 120 days to prove their citizenship at hundreds of regional quasi-judicial bodies known as foreigners’ tribunals. If ruled to be illegal immigrants there, they can appeal to higher courts. Assam has long seen large influxes from elsewhere, including under British colonial rule and around Bangladesh´s 1971 war of independence when millions fled into India.
Resentment against illegal immigrants has simmered for years in Assam, one of India’s poorest states, with residents blaming outsiders, many said to come from neighbouring Bangladesh, for stealing their jobs and land. Shahibul Haque Shikdar, a Muslim college teacher, was distraught after two of his children made it to the list but he was left out.
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