Hyderabad: President of the AlI India MIM Asaduddin Owaisi hit out at the Union government after a row erupted over the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issuing notices to 127 people in Hyderabad asking them to prove their citizenship. He accused the UIDAI of bias.
In a series of tweets UIDAI tried to clarify its stand, but the Hyderabad Member of Parliament questioned the very authority of UIDAI to ask anyone to prove their citizenship.
Owaisi asked UIDAI how many Muslims and Dalits were among those it had asked to prove their citizenship. He claimed that UIDAI did not follow due procedure and abused its powers. The result was panic among people.
He said that first, the UIDAI doesn’t have the powers to verify citizenship. It has powers to look into cases of Aadhaar being granted incorrectly. He mentioned that the deputy director in this case made it out to be about verifying citizenship, which he isn’t empowered to do. Moreover, the identical notices don’t provide any specific findings of the preliminary inquiry that has to be made, and they don’t even say what these “false pretences” (under which the card was obtained) were.
He said the words used in the notice are ‘verification of citizenship’ (not validity of Aadhaar). So will UIDAI suspend its Deputy Director who issued this notice, he asked, as officials have clearly exceeded their powers by issuing these notices. It was in bad faith and a biased exercise of their powers.
Asaduddin Owaisi asked which police officer had provided this information to UIDAI. He also asked the DGP of Telangana to confirm whether the police shared the list of 127 names with UIDAI. “Can they tell us on what grounds they reached this conclusion as UIDAI has now shifted the responsibility to the Telangana police and now it is their responsibility to clear the air,” he said.
He also said the Telangana police must stop asking for Aadhaar during search and cordon operations as they are not legally permitted to do so.
