The Assembly on Friday passed a resolution opposing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and ruled out the possibility of any such exercise in Bengal.

The resolution — introduced by the Trinamul Congress and supported by the Left and the Congress — is the first such official protest against the exercise that has kept 19 lakh people in Assam out of the final list.

“We do not accept the NRC. What has happened in Assam can never happen in Bengal,” said chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who spoke for around 30 minutes on the resolution that was tabled under Rule 185 of the Rules of Procedures of Conduct of Business of the House.

She thanked Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar for opposing an NRC-like exercise and said she expected more people to start raising their voices against the move of “dividing the citizenry” in the coming days.

Twelve legislators, including two from the BJP, spoke on the resolution.

The issue has assumed importance in Bengal not only because of the state’s geographical proximity to Assam, but also because of repeated assertions by the state and central BJP leadership that an NRC-like exercise would be carried out in Bengal. Both the BJP legislators — Manoj Tigga and Swadhin Sarkar — in their speech supported the NRC before staging a walkout.

During her address, Mamata asked whether the MLAs from Darjeeling were in the House and said: “Do you know, over one lakh Gorkhas are not in the NRC? Vote for the BJP and this is what you will get.”

The chief minister said the Assam Accord — a memorandum of settlement signed between the Centre and the leaders of the Assam Movement in 1985 — was the reason behind the NRC and no such agreement ever existed in the case of Bengal.

Speakers like Sujan Chakraborty and Ali Imran Ramz of the Left and Udayan Guha of Trinamul repeatedly asked whether the rule of linking citizenship with the ability to produce some documents was fair.

Mamata went a step further and cited the collapse of houses in Bowbazar to highlight the possibility of people losing all their documents because of some calamity.

“We think the NRC is a conspiracy,” said Mamata, adding that it was a tool for vendetta.

“The NRC implementation is nothing but an attempt to divert the attention of the common people from the economic crisis in the country,” the chief minister said.