Kin of British-Era Pharmacist Bipin Chandra Das Find Their Names Excluded from Final NRC

Guwahati, September 7, 2019:

The final draft of the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was published on September 9, has left over nineteen lakh people 'stateless'. After the list was published, many 'sons of the soil' alleged that their names had been left out of the draft.

Tho crying foul over the final NRC list included over 1 lakh Gorkhas, who had been left out. Moreover, many freedom fighters, as well as the kin of former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, also found their names excluded from the list.

Now, the kin of Bipin Chandra Das, a man who was enrolled as a pharmacist as far back as 1928 in British-era India, find themselves excluded from the final draft NRC. His worried kin, now settled at Bilasipara in Dhubri district, have even submitted a letter to the Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, but it is still unclear as to what will happen next.

Das, who attended the Berry White School of Medicine in Dibrugarh and was chosen fir for "compounding, mixing, preparing, dispensing, and selling drugs" in British India, was clearly a bona fide citizen.

This man, who was a pharmacist back in the days when the words 'chemist' and 'pharmacist' were not synonymous with each other, and it was in fact, a highly respectable profession, must be rolling in his grave to discover that by being left out of the NRC, a definitive document of 'citizenship', his descendants will now be potentially be tagged as 'foreigners'.

One of his descendants, Manjit Das, told Inside Northeast that many legal citizens have been left out. "We had all the necessary documents, our grandfather's name was in the NRC list of 1951, we have land documents from 1961. We are not foreigners, we belong to the Kalita (General) caste, yet many people -- my maternal aunt, uncle, their kids -- they have all been left out of the list", he said.

"We have met the Chief Minister. We have requested that our names be included in the draft. My family is honestly very stressed out, scared even, as they are sons of the soil, and suddenly, they are having to face this very difficult situation", he laments.

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