GUWAHATI: The
Supreme Court on Tuesday said certificates given by
gram panchayat secretaries can be used to claim inclusion in the
National Register of Citizens (NRC), thereby setting aside an earlier
Gauhati high court verdict that declared such documents inadmissible as the sole proof of nationality.
The Supreme Court bench, comprising Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice RF Nariman, said, “The certificate will be put to such limited use only if the contents of the certificate are found to be established on due and proper enquiry and verification.”
The bench added, “If the document and its contents is to be subjected to a thorough search and probe, we do not see why the certificate should have been interdicted by the high court, particularly, in the context of the facts surrounding the enumeration and inclusion of the documents mentioned in the illustrative list of documents.”
The certificate of the gram panchayat, countersigned by the local revenue official, is only for the use of married women who have migrated from one rural area to another to establish their linkage with their ancestors.
The apex court’s order has lifted off uncertainty over 29 lakh married women, whose applications for inclusion in the updated NRC have been kept in abeyance following the high court’s order.
The certificate is not mandatory for every married woman but is an additional option in the absence of any other legally acceptable documents, which contains her name and her ancestor’s name together.
The high court had earlier said questioned the legal validity of the certificates while hearing the question of citizenship of one Muslim woman, Monwara Bewa of Dhubri, which she challenged in the apex court.
Based on her petition and several others, the apex court gave its judgment on Tuesday.
Bewa’s counsel, Burhan Rahman, told TOI, “The gram panchayat certificate has been allowed by the Supreme Court to be used for a limited purpose of establishing linkage only and after verification.”