Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee called out the BJP-led Assam government for allegedly trying to push the NRC in Bengal, where it had no jurisdiction.

Referring to an NRC notice issued by the Assam Foreigner’s Tribunal to a Cooch Behar villager Uttam Kumar Brajabasi, Mamata said, “This is nothing short of a systematic assault on democracy. It is proof that the ruling BJP dispensation in Assam is attempting to implement NRC in Bengal, where it holds no power or jurisdiction.”

Mamata had earlier red-flagged the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar claiming the central poll panel was trying to bring NRC and disenfranchise voters.

She had also expressed apprehension that Bengal, which goes to polls next year, was the BJP’s target.

“A premeditated attempt is being made to intimidate, disenfranchise, and target marginalised communities. This unconstitutional overreach in anti-people and exposes BJP’s dangerous agenda of bulldozing democratic safeguards and erasing the identity of Bengal’s people,” Mamata wrote on X.

A resident of Cooch Behar’s Sadiyaler Kuti, Brajabasi had received a notice from the Foreigner’s Tribunal in Kamrup, Assam claiming that he had entered Assam illegally between January 1, 1966 and March 24, 1971. Brajabasi had appeared before a Kamrup court and has been instructed to produce the voters’ list that proves his late father had been in the electoral rolls from successive elections from 1966 till his death in 2008.

“Despite furnishing valid identity documents, he is being harassed on suspicion of being a “foreigner/illegal migrant,” Mamata wrote.

Mamata also called for opposition unity against the Narendra Modi government’s alleged push for NRC in the country.

“This alarming situation calls for urgent unity among all Opposition parties to stand up against BJP’s divisive and oppressive machinery.