The Gauhati High Court has delivered an unusually sharp rebuke to Assam’s citizenship-determination machinery after a Bengali-origin Muslim woman, Mumtaz Begum, was arrested from the premises of a Foreigners Tribunal and subsequently expelled to Bangladesh without being given a meaningful opportunity to challenge the order declaring her a foreigner.
In an important first, the court has directed the Assam government to pay Begum interim compensation of ₹2 lakh. More significantly, however, the judgment raises disturbing questions about the manner in which the Foreigners Tribunal, police and State authorities operated in her case—and whether the machinery of citizenship determination was used to prevent judicial scrutiny rather than facilitate it.
As per the Scroll report, the Gauhati High Court bench of Justice Kalyan Rai Surana and Justice Susmita Phukan Khaund found that the conduct of the Nagaon Foreigners Tribunal displayed an apparent “malice in law”. The court went further, holding that the State machinery had acted “in tandem” to prevent Begum from exercising her right to approach the High Court against the tribunal’s order.
The case therefore goes beyond an individual error by a tribunal. It exposes what can happen when the determination of citizenship, detention and expulsion operate in close succession, leaving the person concerned with little or no practical opportunity to seek judicial protection.
A case that should never have reached deportation
Begum’s ordeal began decades before her eventual expulsion. As reported by Scroll, she was marked as a ‘D’ or doubtful voter in 1997, following a revision of electoral rolls in Assam. According to Scroll, around three lakh voters were disenfranchised during that process, with many subsequently referred by the border police to Foreigners Tribunals. Begum’s citizenship case then moved through the familiar and often exhausting cycle of tribunal proceedings and judicial challenges.
In 2017, the Nagaon Foreigners Tribunal ruled against her. She challenged that decision before the Gauhati High Court, which ordered a retrial. She returned to the tribunal, where she was again declared a foreigner. Begum challenged the decision once more in 2019. This time, the High Court found that the tribunal had failed to properly consider the evidence she had produced and directed it to reconsider the matter.
That direction should have meant another opportunity for the tribunal to examine the evidence and reach a fresh decision in accordance with law. Instead, the proceedings took a deeply troubling turn.
Arrested when she appeared to defend her case
On May 30, Begum appeared before the Nagaon Foreigners Tribunal pursuant to the High Court’s directions. According to the account reported by Scroll, rather than receiving a substantive reconsideration of her case, she was declared a foreigner and arrested within minutes of appearing before the tribunal. Her lawyers alleged that she was not even supplied a copy of the order—an omission that had obvious consequences because without knowing the contents of the order, challenging it became practically impossible. The High Court subsequently scrutinised the sequence of events surrounding her arrest.
Begum’s family said she appeared before the tribunal at around 12.30 pm and was arrested roughly half an hour later. As Scroll reported, the tribunal judge disputed this account. The Nagaon Superintendent of Police also told the court that the border police had arrested her near the tribunal premises at around 2 pm. But the High Court was not persuaded by the competing explanations.
The court reasoned that if Begum had actually been informed, even orally, that she had been declared a foreigner, there would have been little reason for her to remain around the tribunal premises during the period in which the police were able to take her into custody. That observation goes to the heart of the case.
The question was not simply whether Begum had been declared a foreigner. It was whether the process had been deliberately structured in such a way that she could be removed before she could challenge that declaration.
The right to appeal cannot be defeated by detention
The High Court’s most serious finding concerns precisely this issue. According to the court, the tribunal judge had “deliberately and wilfully delayed” issuing the order in a manner that enabled Begum to be arrested, moved to the Matia detention centre and subsequently expelled from India. The court concluded that the State machinery had thereby prevented her from exhausting her legal remedies and from approaching the High Court through a writ petition.
This is crucial. A tribunal’s declaration that a person is a foreigner does not, by itself, erase the constitutional right to challenge the decision. A legal system cannot meaningfully provide a remedy if the person concerned be removed from the country before she can access that remedy. The problem becomes particularly stark in citizenship cases, where the consequences of an adverse order can include detention, separation from family and eventual expulsion. The right to judicial review cannot become merely theoretical.
The tribunal’s conduct under scrutiny
The court did not confine its criticism to the consequences of the tribunal’s order. It questioned the circumstances in which the order itself came into existence. The High Court directed Assam’s Home and Political Department to investigate the date and time on which the tribunal member had prepared the opinion, Scroll reported. If necessary, the authorities were even directed to seize the tribunal member’s computer to establish when the order had been prepared.
The High Court also criticised the tribunal judge, Bipul Kumar Nath, saying that he appeared to have developed a personal grudge because the matter had earlier been remanded to him for fresh consideration. The issue, therefore, was not simply procedural irregularity. The court was examining whether the process had been manipulated to produce a particular outcome—and to ensure that outcome could not be challenged in time.
Expulsion before legal remedies were exhausted
The court also pointed to the safeguards governing expulsion. As reported by Scroll, the High Court found that Begum was denied an opportunity to challenge the May 30 order, which it described as a direct violation of the applicable standard operating procedure under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950. The procedure requires legal remedies available to a person to be exhausted before expulsion. That safeguard is not a technicality.
Expulsion is an irreversible act with potentially devastating consequences. Once a person is pushed across an international border, access to Indian courts, lawyers, documents and family becomes infinitely more difficult. In Begum’s case, that is precisely what appears to have happened. Her family discovered that she had been expelled only after approaching the Gauhati High Court with a habeas corpus petition. The court subsequently involved the Ministry of External Affairs and indicated that efforts should be made to locate Begum in Bangladesh and bring her back to India.
Article 21 does not stop at citizenship
One of the most important aspects of the judgment is the High Court’s invocation of Article 21 of the Constitution. The court reiterated that the protection of life and personal liberty extends not only to Indian citizens but also to non-citizens. In other words, even a person whom the State treats as a foreign national does not become a person without constitutional protection. This principle is particularly significant in Assam, where citizenship status has become deeply intertwined with detention, deportation and political debates about migration.
The constitutional question cannot simply be reduced to whether a person has successfully established citizenship. Even where the State claims that an individual is a foreign national, the State must still act according to law. It cannot imprison a person without due process, suppress an available remedy, conceal an order from the person affected, or remove her from the country before she has had a genuine opportunity to challenge the decision.
₹2 lakh is compensation—but the judgment is about much more
The ₹2 lakh compensation ordered by the High Court should not obscure the larger significance of the case as the Gauhati High Court has also attempted to ensure that what happened to Begum is not repeated. It directed the Superintendent of Police in every district of Assam to ensure that a person declared a foreign national is informed of the tribunal’s judgment before being taken into custody. It further directed that an adult member of the person’s family should be informed before the detainee is moved outside the jurisdiction of the district police.
These directions are significant because they recognise a basic principle of procedural fairness: a person must know what has been decided against them before the State takes away their liberty.
Family notification is equally important. In citizenship and detention cases, the disappearance of a family member can leave relatives with no information about where the person has been taken or whether they remain in the country.
The High Court has effectively drawn a line: a declaration of foreigner status does not authorise the State to bypass due process. The State cannot convert a tribunal order into an immediate mechanism of disappearance. It cannot use detention to defeat the right of appeal. And it cannot treat the absence of citizenship status as the absence of constitutional rights.
Related:
From Statelessness to Citizenship: CJP helps Adori Bibi reclaim her Indian identity
Nationality Before Deportation: The Rajubala Das case
Another CJP Victory: Barpeta Tribunal declares Alam Khan ‘not a foreigner’