Prateek Hajela gets scolded by Supreme Court for talking to media

The Supreme Court on Tuesday scolded Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) coordinator Prateek Hajela and Registrar General of India (RGI) Sailesh for speaking before the media on the issue of dealing with claims and objections of those who have been left out in the draft NRC. A bench comprising justices Ranjan Gogoi and R F Nariman further said that it could have sent them to jail for contempt, and restrained them from speaking to media in future without its approval. The apex court termed this incident as Nariman termed as “most unfortunate”.

A visibly angry Justice Gogoi told that “Don’t forget, you are the officers of the court. Your job is to comply with our directions. How can you go to press like this.” However, both Hajela & RGI tendered unconditional apology to the bench. The bench said that it had asked the Centre to formulate standard operating procedures to deal with the claims and objections of those who have been left out in the draft NRC and accused the officials of making statements on modalities which squarely fell in its domain.

The bench said that it could have taken a “sterner view” of the matter but was lenient keeping in mind the future task of preparation and publication of final NRC of Assam.“Your job is not to go to press holding the brief for somebody,” the bench said.  The next hearing was fixed on August 16.

The apex court had on July 31 said that there will be no coercive action by authorities against over 40 lakh people, whose names do not figure in Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) and observed that it was merely a draft. The NRC report said that out of 3.29 crore people, names of 2.89 crore have been included in the draft NRC. It further said that names of 40,70,707 people do not figure in the list. Of the these, 37,59,630 names have been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 are on hold.