Will a minor spelling error in the Aadhaar card affect your fate?
Such fears are haunting many Muslims in Mumbai like Mohammad Asif in the wake of the CAA and NRC
After the notification of the Citizenship Amendment Act rules in March, many are rushing to get their documentation in order
Even on the night of Ramzan, advocate Nadeem Siddiqui’s office in Mumbai Central is bustling with activity
43-year-old Siddiqui, a lawyer, helps people with free legal advice to ensure that their identity documents are free from discrepancies
“What you see here is the office we’ve setup for aiding people with documentation correction. At first, we used to organise camps for the same, now we’ve shifted to this office. If there are any corrections needed in any type of document that proves your identity - whether it’s Aadhaar or PAN card, voter ID, passport, or birth certificate- we advise people on how and where to get them done.
If it’s to be done online, then we do it online. And whatever is done only offline, we advise people on where to go in order to make the changes.”
Siddiqui had started this initiative in 2020, when the CAA-NRC came into the limelight.
“I saw that there was an error in my documents too, which took me around 3 months to correct. It struck me that as a lawyer, it took me so much time, so what about those who had no idea on how to go about this? This is why we started this”
“This office has been on since 2022, from 2 pm to 10 pm on regular days. Earlier, every day there would be 10-15 walk-ins. The number increased to 20-25 and now, ever since the CAA/NRC has been back in the news since January, we get around 120-125 walk-ins per day, which sometimes increases to 150 too.
Editorial | Perverse intent: On the Citizenship (Amendment) Act
Fear of exclusion
The final draft of National Register of Citizens, or NRC, excluded 19.06 lakh people of the 3.3 crore people who had applied for inclusion in Assam
The exercise was done to document the legal citizens of India.
Critics have said that the government could use the list to deprive some Muslims, who could be marked as doubtful citizens, as CAA paves the way for granting citizenship to undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who entered India before December 31st, 2014.
Like Siddiqui, Salman Qureshi is also helping people to get their papers corrected by organising documentation camps in Mumbai
“My name is Salmaan [Qureshi]. I’ve studied Law but I’m not a practising advocate, I am a lawyer though. Since the past one-and-a-half years, I’ve been working in the realms of documentation. We had started with aiding people in making ‘EWS’, then with ‘Domiciles’, then we encountered many people coming to us for document corrections because of the fear of CAA/NRC, especially against Muslims. So we started making the gazettes and getting their documents corrected. And now, many people are concerned with their birth certificates and LCs [leaving certificates], as compared to other documents.”
Report & visuals: Gautam Doshi
Production: Gayatri Menon
Voiceover: Sharmada Venkatasubramanian
