The Joint Forum Against NRC, a conglomerate of apolitical mass organisations, on Thursday conducted a march from Rajabazar to Salt Lake’s Janganana Bhavan, the office of the director of census operations, and submitted a memorandum against the Centre’s citizenship tripod.
The forum had originally planned to carry out an awareness march through rural and semi-urban centres around Calcutta to the Bhavan between February 28 and Thursday. But the organisation was not granted permission by the Bidhannagar police commissionerate.
On Thursday, the forum took out a 4.6km march — attended by over 1,000 participants — from the site of an ongoing protest by another organisation at Rajabazar to the Salt Lake office. “We had informed Calcutta police. They neither gave us the go-ahead, nor did they try to stop us. So we conducted our programme peacefully,” said forum convenor Prasenjit Bose.
When stopped by barricades of the Bidhannagar commissionerate, the forum sent five representatives to the Bhavan to meet a team of senior officials of the directorate of census operations.
Although Vishwanath, the director, was out of town on Thursday, he had met a forum delegation on Monday.
“From what we understood, the directorate, with a staff strength of 100, has no way of conducting the National Population Register update exercise without the help of the state government, which has 2.5 lakh employees. The state government did initiate the NPR process alongside the census last year but halted it in December,” Bose said.
