A recent notification from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asking account-holders to submit their Know Your Customer (KYC) documents, which includes the National Population Register (NPR) letter, triggered panic in a village near Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu.
According to a News18 report, the notification was issued on January 11 in a Tamil newspaper in Kayalpattinam in Thoothukudi district.
As the information spread, villagers, most of whom were Muslims, started queuing up outside the bank branch. They feared that the notification was somehow connected to the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the report said.
Villagers rushed to the branch between January 20 and January 22 and withdrew their amount of money. Among these, many account holders withdrew their entire amount of money from the branch in view of the notification, the report said, adding that the withdrawal amount had gone up to as much as Rs 4 crore.
Asked about the reason behind the rush to withdraw money, a local told the publication that the bank notification asking account-holders to produce their KYC documents seemed a routine one, but the mention of NPR as one of the valid documents scared many of the villagers.
The NPR is an exercise that is likely to be launched in April by the central government. Reports stating that it could become the basis for assessing citizenship based on documents of people's ancestry have triggered fear among people, especially Muslims.
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