Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has cited a letter from the Centre on identifying illegal Aadhaar cardholders in North-and South-24 Parganas to flag concerns whether the Narendra Modi government was reviving the citizenship overdrive ahead of the general election.

During a news conference at the state secretariat, Mamata read out from the operative part of a letter sent to her office from Delhi: “I am directed to refer to ongoing exercise for verification/ updation of illegal Aadhaar cards in the selected districts and to forward a list of the specific location of exact pockets of settlements of illegal foreigners in those selected districts to enable UIDAI to be more focussed in the exercise for the elimination of illegal Aadhaar cards.”

The letter was addressed to the chief executive officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) from an under-secretary in the Union home ministry, which was subsequently forwarded to the chief minister’s office.

In Calcutta, Mamata said the tenor of the letter made it clear that the ruling dispensation in Delhi had begun the process of implementing the controversial citizenship matrix — the CAA and the NRC-NPR — ahead of the 2024 election.

The Modi government’s plans to roll out these provisions had to be put on hold in the middle of protests and the pandemic.

That the main agenda is to polarise people along religious lines is clear in the letter, Mamata said, referring to the shortlisting of North- and South 24-Parganas for conducting the exercise.

“They want to eliminate a particular community from their rights of citizenship through this drive. The plot is to declare all those people ‘foreigners’ if their Aadhaar card is detected with any lack (of information). It means they are again playing with the NRC card,” she said.

The specific areas mentioned in the letter are Barasat, Hasnabad, Bongaon, Petrapole, Barrackpore, Naihati, Jagatdal and Khardaha in North 24-Parganas and Baruipur, Canning, Sonarpur and Malikpur in South 24-Parganas, Mamata said.

“They (the Centre) don’t want to spare even a little boy or girl from their drive and they will declare even minors as foreigners in case they lack any documents.... You can easily recall what happened in Assam, the detention centres,” she added.

The preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was started in Assam in 2013, followed by the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019. A large number of people whose names did not figure in the final NRC in Assam were sent to detention camps.

The BJP establishment in Bengal believes that the citizenship issue will be a potent polarisation tool in Bengal, a border state with a significant minority population. The saffron camp’s assessment is based on its relatively better performance in the border areas in North 24-Parganas, Nadia and some north Bengal districts.

Mamata vowed not to take part in the exercise and tried to send out a message to the minority community. “I am not going to take part in the NRC-like exercise. I will not allow them to play with the NRC card here. I think that all who live in Bengal are already citizens of our country,” she said.

A source in the central government said the exercise was a pilot project involving at least eight states and had no connection with the NRC.

“There are so many people using fake Aadhaar cards to use different facilities. The government wants to detect these false documents,” the source said.

Asked, a source in the Union home ministry in New Delhi said on the condition of anonymity that he was not aware of the letter. But a source in another border state said the administration had been told to “weed out” fake Aadhaar cards.

During the news conference, Mamata criticised the Centre for increasing the radius of the BSF’s jurisdiction from 15km to 50km from the border areas and attributed a motive to the move.

“This has been done so that during the panchayat elections, these BSF jawans can harass common people and stop them from exercising their democratic right,” Mamata said.

Additional reporting from our New Delhi Bureau