Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday said Bharatiya Janata Party’s Delhi President Manoj Tiwari would be the first to leave the national capital if the National Register of Citizens was implemented in Delhi, ANI reported. Last month, Tiwari had called for the exercise to be replicated in Delhi to identify “illegal immigrants” and said the situation had become dangerous.

“If I am illegal, then is Kejriwal implying that every Purvanchali [Purvanchal is the region consisting of the eastern end of Uttar Pradesh and the western end of Bihar] is illegal?” News 18 quoted Tiwari as saying. “You want to throw them out of Delhi too? NRC identifies illegal immigrants, that is people who are from outside India and not from other parts of India. What the CM said will now be answered by the people of Delhi.”

The final list of the National Register of Citizens in Assam was released on August 31. It excluded more than 19 lakh people out of 3.3 crore applicants. While most BJP leaders have hailed the exercise as a means to establish bonafide citizens of the country, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the government had lost hope in “the present form” of the NRC. The saffron party’s Assam unit also said it did not trust the final list. The expressed dissatisfaction after a number of Bengali Hindus, the BJP’s oldest vote bank in the state, did not figure in the updated citizens’ database.

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