Manipur all-party meeting presses Delhi for a 1951 NRC gazette

Manipur’s political parties and fourteen civil organisations sat with Chief Minister Y Khemchand Singh at the Cabinet Hall in Mantripukhri on the evening of 14 September and agreed to press New Delhi for a gazette notification on an updated National Register of Citizens, with 1951 as the base year. The meeting ran from 6 p.m. to about 8.30 p.m. Congress, BJP, CPI, CPI(M), the Republican Party of India and Forward Bloc sent representatives. Sitting MLAs did not attend.

Khuraijam Shanta, speaking after the session, said the state government would take the first job of persuading the Centre to issue the gazette and to accept 1951. A sub-committee of parties and civil groups will ask Union Home Minister Amit Shah for the same when he is due in the state in October. If that visit does not produce a notification, the sub-committee will go to Delhi.

The Assembly had already, on 2 September, restated earlier House resolutions that an NRC should be updated before the next census. On the last day of that session the House discussed 1951 as the base year. Government spokesmen Th. Radheshyam and Sapam Ranjan Singh said last week that Khemchand had carried that demand to the Centre and that the Union home ministry had postponed the census process after a campaign by Manipur legislators in Delhi.

Home Minister Govindas Konthoujam told the Assembly earlier this month that 24,475 people have been listed as illegal immigrants and 14,992 pushed back to Myanmar. He said the state cannot run an NRC alone. That is the legal fact underneath Monday night’s communique. Citizenship rolls are a Union subject. A state can pass resolutions, name a base year and send a sub-committee to Delhi. It cannot gazette the register.

The Joint Forum for Justice and Fair Delimitation has been calling for government offices to close until the NRC demand is met. Radheshyam and Ranjan asked the forum last week to drop that agitation, arguing that the House had done its part and that office closures punish the public. Monday night’s meeting is the government’s attempt to show the forum a second piece of paper: an all-party line, including the Congress and the left, behind a 1951 gazette.

1951 is not a neutral date in the Northeast. Assam’s NRC used 1971. A 1951 cut-off in Manipur would treat a longer stretch of inward movement as ineligible. That is why civil groups in the valley want it written into a Union gazette, and why any future process will be watched from the hill districts, where displacement after the violence that began on 3 May 2023 already stripped tens of thousands of people from familiar addresses. Final photo rolls published on 6 September after the special intensive revision left Manipur with 19,60,620 electors, 1.32 lakh names fewer than the previous count.

Khemchand posted that the meeting discussed several state issues and the NRC “in the interest of the people.” An official note said the session ended on a positive note. The operational output is thinner and clearer: one sub-committee, one October appointment with Shah, and a promise that Imphal, not a street committee, will carry the gazette demand. If October passes without a notification, the same groups who sat in the Cabinet Hall will have to decide whether the next step is Delhi or another shutdown of offices.