The report, titled ‘Unmaking Citizens: The Architecture of Rights Violations and Exclusion in India’s Citizenship Trials’, the report has been authored by Mohsin Alam Bhat of Queen Mary University, Arushi Gupta, and Shardul Gopujkar, with the support of researchers and law students from the NLSIU, and members of Parichay Legal Aid Clinic. The event took place at the Teen Murti Bhavan, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi.

“As of 2025, Assam’s tribunals have declared nearly 166,000 people as ‘foreigners’. In addition to more than 85,000 pending cases, these tribunals may also soon hear more than a million appeals from those excluded from the NRC,” one of the speakers said at the release.

Among the speakers at the release were Hon’ble Mr Justice Madan Lokur (Retired), former Judge, Supreme Court of India, Dr. Usha Ramanathan, Human Rights Activist and Independent Researcher, Mr. HRA Choudhary, Senior Advocate, Gauhati High Court, Dr. Mohsin Alam Bhat, Assistant Professor of Law, Queen Mary University of London and Ms. Darshana Mitra, Assistant Professor of Law and Director-Clinics, NLSIU.

In 2020, in the Statelessness & Citizenship Review, a paper by Talha Abdul Rahman[1] titled, Identifying the Outsider: An Assessment of Foreigner Tribunals in the Indian State of Assam, also interrogates the constitutional validity of the very institution of Foreigners Tribunals in Assam.

What the report says

The analysis, based on 1,193 High Court cases, landmark Supreme Court rulings, and in-depth field interviews, this report offers the most comprehensive study yet of Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals. It reveals a legal system in deep crisis: over 165,000 people have already been declared “foreigners,” with 85,000+ cases pending and more than 1 million NRC appeals potentially headed to these opaque tribunals. The report documents widespread arbitrariness in decision-making, including the wholesale rejection of documentary and oral evidence, and the absence of legal norms to protect individuals from wrongful targeting. These are not isolated failures—they reflect an institutionalised machinery of exclusion, with severe regional and national implications, says a statement released by the NLSU.

“Citizenship adjudication engages constitutionally significant questions with profound consequences, including the risk of statelessness. Such determinations require bodies that are legally constituted, independent, impartial, and composed of competent legal officers,” the study summarises in a chapter on “institutionalised arbitrariness”.

The report argued that the FT system fails on all these counts. “It lacks a secure legal foundation, is vulnerable to executive interference, and is staffed by inadequately qualified adjudicators. It thus stands in stark violation of the rule of law and the right to an effective remedy under both domestic and international law,” it said, adding that the FTs have become routine instruments of exclusion and violate the right to a fair trial.

‘Lowering standards’

At present, Assam has 100 FTs, each headed by a judge-like member, which were formed after the Supreme Court scrapped the controversial Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 1983 in 2005. Of these 100 tribunals, 36 are permanent and 54 require periodic extension of terms from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The Foreigners Tribunals, unlike Tribunals that have a constitutional validity (established under Part XIVA of the Constitution), specifically Articles 323A and 323B, which are under the higher judiciary, are solely appointed by the state executive. Tribunals that have a constitutional legitimacy were introduced by the 42nd Amendment in 1976. Article 323A deals with administrative tribunals, while Article 323B pertains to tribunals for other matters. Contrary to this, the sole adjudicator –in appointment and renumeration –is the state executive—in a sense blurring the constitutional scheme of separation of powers. [2]

Figure 1: Structure of Indian tribunal system 

Source: PRS

NLSU Study: Assam’s Foreigner Tribunals

The study further highlights that the appointment process for Foreigner Tribunal (FT) members is opaque, with no guaranteed tenure. Advertisements by the Gauhati High Court and notifications from the Assam Government’s Political Department specify terms of one or two years, varying by executive whim, and extendable at the State’s discretion, it says.

“This tenure is governed by no legislation or by-laws and depends entirely on executive whim, despite being an essential legislative function. Moreover, it is violative of the Supreme Court’s judgments holding that a tenure of less than 5 years threatens to compromise the quality of adjudication by tribunals,” it said.

“The qualifications for FT members have progressively weakened. In 2011, only retired judicial officers from the Assam Judicial Service, experienced in procedural law, were eligible. They could serve until age 67, with salaries based on last drawn pay plus allowances. This ensured appointments of individuals with judicial expertise. By 2015, eligibility expanded to include advocates with at least 10 years of practice, lowering the standard,” the report said.

Appointments became two-year contracts with fixed monthly pay, enabling lawyers without judicial experience to decide critical citizenship matters. The 2019 revisions diluted requirements further; minimum practice dropped to seven years, minimum age to 35, and appointments became more flexible, allowing less experienced candidates to adjudicate complex citizenship issues, thereby compromising the quality of justice,” it stated.

A Gauhati High Court notification added criteria of “fair knowledge of the official language of Assam” and “Assam’s historical background giving rise to foreigners’ issues.” Yet, no requirement exists for expertise in immigration or citizenship law, the report pointed out.

The authors noted with concern that citizenship determination under the FTs has remained unchanged even after Parliament enacted the Immigration and Foreigners Act of 2025. “The stakes for legal violations have become unprecedented, with the prospects of a nationwide NRC exercise and the recent spree of ‘pushback’ deportations in Assam,” they said, calling for an overhaul of the legal structures governing citizenship in India.

[1] Talha Abdul Rahman (BA, LLB (Hons) (NALSAR, India), BCL (Oxon), Advocate on Record, Supreme Court of India, New Delhi. Visiting Fellow (2020), Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. The author acknowledges that this work has immensely benefited from the Visiting Fellowship and support from Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne.

[2] The tribunal system has developed as a parallel to the traditional court system over the last eighty years.  The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal was created in 1941 to reduce pendency of cases in courts.¹  After the insertion of Articles 323A and 323B, several tribunals such as the Central Administrative Tribunal as well as sector specific tribunals were set up from the 1980s to 2010s.  The Finance Act, 2017 consolidated several tribunals.  In 2021, a Bill has been introduced that abolishes nine tribunals and transfers the matters to courts.

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The post Assam’s Foreigners’ Tribunals bypass constitutional safeguards: Report appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In doing so, the Supreme Court bench overturned the order of Guwahati High Court where the HC had ruled out the Panchayat certificates fit for National Register of Citizens.

The decision on Tuesday follows a number of petitions challenging the Guwahati High Court’s order. The leading petition in the matter was filed by 40-year-old Monowara Bewa, a resident of Dhubri district of Assam who was marked as D-voter by the local election body.

Another petition was by Rukhsana Begum, which had many other parties. Leading Islamic body Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind provided resources and help to these petitioners for the case.

Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, Maulana Mahmood Madani and Tariq Qasmi were present in the courtroom on Tuesday when the judgement was delivered.

Maulana Badruddin Ajmal told TwoCircles.net on phone, “We knew these 48 lakh women of Assam will get justice, and our faith and Indian judiciary and constitution has not gone in vain.”

In its judgement on Tuesday, Supreme Court also rejected the division of citizens done by Assam government, where the later divided the citizens among “Original” and “Non-original” categories creating a controversy across the state.

The story shall be updated once the court order is available.

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

The post Assam: SC provides relief to 50 lakh women; says panchayat certificate is proof of citizenship appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Moinal Molla, 32, at his lawyer’s chambers in Guwahati, Assam. He was one of nearly 90,000 people declared as an illegal immigrant over 51 years to August 2017. More than 2,000 are currently in six detention centres statewide.
 
An illiterate, slightly built Bengali weakened by asthma, Molla, now 32, wasn’t told why he was being taken, only that the gaon-burra, the headman, would come and get him. Instead, he was taken to a magistrate’s court, pronounced an illegal immigrant even though his parents were Indian, and put in a police vehicle, he said.
 
“I cried,” said Molla, “I didn’t know where I was going.” He wound up 100 km from home in a detention centre, where he would stay for the next two years, 10 months and 29 days–this, too, he remembers. For the first few weeks, he cried every day, uncertain if he would ever see his wife, three children and parents again. The shock lasted two months. After that, he told himself that whatever happened would be Allah’s will.
 
Molla was among 89,395 people–among 5 million illegal immigrants estimated in Assam–declared “foreigners” in the state over 51 years to August 2017, according to data provided to IndiaSpend by the Assam Border Police Organisation, the only state with a force dedicated to stopping illegal migration. There are currently more than 2,000 people in six detention centres statewide.
 
At the detention centre, the jailers segregated inmates into two categories: “Bangladeshis” and “d-voters”, or doubtful voters, the phrase used in Assam to describe 150,000 voters with questionable electoral credentials. The jailers’ logic was that no one came to visit the “foreigners”, while families came to visit d-voters from other parts of Assam, so they were Indian.
 
That blurred, unofficial distinction is at the heart of a renewed effort–given fresh impetus by the ascension to power in May 2016 of the state’s first Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government–to identify, arrest and deport “Bangladeshis”. It involves about 100,000 or more government personnel, costs hundreds of crores and is India’s–and one of the world’s–largest efforts at disenfranchisement.
 
Now, as a December 2017 deadline for the latest Supreme-Court-monitored iteration, driven by computers and algorithms nears, it threatens to flounder on legal definitions, religious and ethnic turmoil, implementation hurdles and a fraught question: Who is an Indian citizen?
 
For Molla, that proof was in documents issued by the government–except that the government declared him a d-voter without checking those documents.
 
For months, Molla’s life fell into the routine of imprisonment: Wake up at 6 am, tea and a chapati for breakfast, some hours in the open air, television; the occasional hospital visit when his asthma alarmed the jail authorities; and anticipation of the weekly non-vegetarian meal (fish and egg alternated), the tri-monthly visit from his younger brother, who–like Molla–binds books for a living and had to forgo Rs 550 in wages every time he made the 160-km journey, and more infrequently from his wife and children.
 
“When they came,” said Molla, “We all cried.”
 
Can parents be citizens, their son a foreigner?
 
The police took Molla to a detention camp after a magistrate’s court declared him a foreigner. He did not get a chance to defend himself because he was not present in court.
 
Molla was declared a d-voter in 1998, in absentia by government officials–most carrying out immigration duties are from various departments, such as irrigation or education–who told the judge he was not there when they went to his house in Barpeta seeking proof of citizenship. Molla said no one came. On February 16, 2010, by “ex parte judgement”–delivered after considering only one party, in this case the state–he was declared a foreigner. Ex-parte judgements are common because those served notice either do not get the notice (home and work addresses may be hundreds of kilometres apart) or go missing once they do, as more than 26,000 have, although many have been arrested, according to the border police.
 
Molla found the details of his case at the detention centre, more than 15 years after he was first listed as being of doubtful citizenship. His lawyer, who was from his home village, told him he had a strong case. “I thought then, for the first time,” said Molla, “that I would be free.”
 

Moinal Molla, with his weeping daughter and mother, on August 3, 2016, the day he was released after more than two years at a detention centre in Assam. An illiterate book binder, Molla was declared a foreigner, although his parents and children are Indian. The Supreme Court accepted his citizenship proof and freed him. The entire village gathered to receive him as he was released. Photo: By special arrangement.
 
The obstacles on his road to freedom included three rejected appeals in the Guwahati High Court–a writ petition, writ appeal and a review petition. It was the Supreme Court that saw no reason for Molla’s proofs of citizenship to be rejected. His parents were Indian, as were his wife, children, brother and the rest of the family. His father’s land records dated back to 1938. The gaon burra had issued a domicile certificate, a document often accepted by the state when other records are incomplete, wrong or destroyed. Molla’s four grandparents were on  a 1951 citizenship list and 1966 voter lists, and his parents were on a 1970 voter list.
 
One or more of these documents is considered proof of citizenship across India, which requires citizens to prove citizenship when needed. But no state has “foreigners tribunals”–there are now 100 in Assam, up from four in 1964–and asks for citizenship proof as Assam does. The anomaly is connected with a wave of illegal immigration, primarily from Bangladesh, and rising hostility to Muslims.
 
Why citizens must prove they entered Assam before 1971
 
In 1985, the year Molla was born, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signed the Assam Accord, which said that anyone who entered the state after March 24, 1971, would be classified a foreigner. 
 
That date, as we shall see, is the crux of the multi-crore effort to disenfranchise illegal immigrants, although concern over illegal immigration was first evident when the Immigrants (Expulsion From Assam) Act, 1950 was passed 67 years ago.
 
“During the last few months a serious situation had arisen from the immigration of a very large number of East Bengal residents into Assam,” the 1950 Act said. “Such large migration is disturbing the economy of the province, besides giving rise to a serious law and order problem.”
 
The 1985 agreement was the culmination of six years of violent protests–known as the Assam Agitation–against illegal immigration from Bangladesh, a nation with which Assam shares a 4,096-km border. Over the decades, the share of Muslims in Assam’s population rose from 23.3% in 1961 to 34% in 2011, according to census data.
 
Source: Census 1961, 1971, 1991, 2001, 2011
Note: The 1981 census could not be conducted in Assam owing to disturbed conditions.
 
What isn’t clear is how many of these are Assamese, Bengali or Bangladeshi. An IndiaSpend analysis of census data showed the state’s population growth rate saw a spurt in 1971, a reflection, officials said, of a tide of migration, which is why that is the cutoff year to prove citizenship. The only other time that Assam’s population growth rate exceeded India’s since was in 1991–by 0.3 percentage points.
 
Source: Planning Commission
 
It was in Molla’s home district that one of the movement’s flashpoints occurred, the killing–allegedly by units led by former Assam and Punjab police chief K P S Gill–of a 20-year-old student, Khargeswar Talukdar, one of 855 “martyrs”, as those who died in the Assam agitation are called.
 
The 1990s were a period of relative quiet because the students, the All Assam Students Union (AASU) who fired the movement against the government, had become the government.
 
In 2004, India’s minister for state for home told Parliament that Assam was home to 5 million Bangladeshis (of 20 million nationwide, including 5.7 million in West Bengal), a statement he was forced to withdraw by his party, the Congress.
 
By the 2010s, the failure of the process of identifying and deporting illegal immigrants was apparent with less than 80,000 identified since 1971, or about 1,740 every year. One of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s electoral promises was to send Bangladeshis back. “You can write it down,” he said at an election rally in Bengal. “After May 16, these Bangladeshis better be prepared with their bags packed.”
 
When a BJP government took charge in Assam, after a campaign that echoed Modi’s anti-Bangladeshi and, by implication anti-Muslim, rhetoric, it moved swiftly to boost anti-immigrant infrastructure and hasten the pace of action, including a move to grant automatic citizenship to illegal Bangladeshi Hindu immigrants, through the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which is pending in Parliament. That isn’t as straightforward as it appears.
 
“If the government grants citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis,” Talukdar’s brother told The Times of Assam on December 11, 2016, “the sacrifice of the Assam Agitation martyrs will go in vain.”
 
The slow, contentious process of disenfranchisement prompted repeated judicial intervention. In 2005, the Supreme Court likened illegal immigration in Assam to “external aggression”. In 2014, the Supreme Court ordered 64 additional foreigners tribunals to be added to the existing 36, apart from ordering a revamp of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), one of the world’s largest, most complex efforts to determine who is a citizen and who is not.
 

Men asked by the government to prove they are Indian gather outside the Kamrup foreigners tribunal in Guwahati, Assam. Most are poor, poorly educated or illiterate and Muslim: Rickshaw pullers, masons, labourers, mechanics and tenant farmers.
 

The Kamrup foreigners tribunal in Guwahati, Assam.
 
That year, although thousands were supposedly identified as being illegal, no more than 24 were deported. In 2015, that number fell to one, going up to 13 in 2016.
 
With the NRC now racing towards a December, 31, 2017, deadline–it missed the first deadline of January 1–to determine how many of Assam’s 34 million people are Indian citizens, the fate of many new Mollas now hangs in the balance.
 
‘In India you are a citizen by birth, in Assam by descent’
 
In an airconditioned office room piled with files and papers, Prateek Hajela, special secretary to government and NRC coordinator, simultaneously used an i-Pad and desktop to explain the complexity of his work.
 
Over nearly four years, the NRC has entered into its database nearly 66 million documents (about 500 truck-loads, he estimated), from birth, school, college certificates to electoral rolls to land and local-government records submitted by 32.5 million people–Molla was one of them–anxious to prove they were here before March 24, 1971. More than 50,000 state government officials went door to door verifying records, and computer programs were deployed to spot fakes. There may be documents that may not be forged but are not true, said Hajela, referring to “contaminated” electoral records–fake rolls prompted the Assam agitation–fake income-tax PAN cards and birth certificates.
 
“Some (documents) are forged, but a large number are not forged, so I have to go by descendents, otherwise I will be legalising everyone who is illegal,” said Hajela, an electronics engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and member of the elite Indian Administrative Service.
 
Descendents are the crux of the issue for the NRC, since the original number of living people born before 1971 is–by his reckoning–about 4 million. The descendents of these 4 million are now trying to prove they are Indians.
 
“In Assam, you are a citizen by descent,” Hajela told IndiaSpend over the course of a three-hour presentation of the NRC’s work. “In the rest of India, you are a citizen by birth.”
 
Apart from home visits to verify identity and cross-checking millions of documents with thousands of institutions that issued them, the key method of trying to attempt accuracy is the family tree, which the NRC generates from its database. A computer programme matches grandparents, with children and grandchildren. Officials call everyone on the family tree to test if they can name everyone in the family.
 
“Basically, it’s about checking consistency among siblings,” said Hajela. Some mismatches are innocent enough–the offspring of people with multiple spouses may not be able to build a tree, some people may have given nicknames, others may have changed names–but they will all be called together before an officer and their statements verified. “This is the only process,” he said, “to bring in the accuracy expected of us.”
 
Some lies have been caught. For instance, tens of people claimed to have the same mother or father, with family tree questioning revealing their inability to name their siblings or grandparents.
 
Of 66 million documents submitted by 6.8 million families–about 32 million people–in Assam, the NRC had verified 49 million documents by October 2017. Hajela would not say how many people had been found illegal. He will submit the final list of illegals to the Supreme Court, which will decide when it will be made public.
 
A former soldier gets police to back down, others–particularly Muslims–cannot
 
Clad in a banian and pant, Mohammed Azmal Haque, 49, was pacing in his modest living-cum-dining-cum-bed room in a Guwahati flat on October 3, 2017, when Assam director general of police Mukesh Sahay appeared on the television.
 
“Basically, it was a case of mistaken identity,” said Sahay, referring to a notice sent to Haque, asking the balding, clean-shaven former Indian soldier to prove he was Indian. The case became national news, prompting the army to intervene, as the embarrassed Assam government backed down.
 
Haque, who joined the army at 18 and served for 30 years, snorted at Sahay’s explanation.
 

Retired soldier Azmal Haque (left) and his family in Guwahati, watching the Assam police chief admit that a notice sent to Haque demanding proof of citizenship was a “mistake”.
 
“There was no mistaken identity,” he told IndiaSpend over biscuits and sweetened puff. “They came for me, and when my angry family refused to accept it, I went to the police station and accepted the notice.”
 
“Jab notice aaya, main hil gaya, aur dukh bhi hua. When the notice came, I was shaken, and I was sad,” said Haque. “If I, as a former soldier, had not publicised my case, I would have ended up in detention. There are thousands of others, citizens of India, who are facing the same harassment. What kind of investigation are they doing before sending out such notices?”
 
Among Haque’s proofs of citizenship: His father’s 1942 primary school certificate, father’s name on 1966 electoral rolls, his mother’s name on the 1951 NRC, and a land deed. Besides, the army conducts its own verification before recruitment. This system of checks failed in Haque’s case. “There is a huge gap between the law and its implementation,” said Syed Burhanur Rahman, a graduate of Delhi’s elite St Stephen’s College and a lawyer who argues citizenship cases in the Guwahati High Court.
 

Azmal Haque in his days as an Indian army soldier. Photo courtesy: Azmal Haque
 
As with Molla, Haque’s documents were either not considered or ignored, reinforcing allegations made by many Muslims and lawyers that Muslims are random targets in citizenship sweeps, a fact that two senior police officials admitted to IndiaSpend on condition of anonymity.
 
Most illegal migrants from Bangladesh are poor, and once they get forged documents and mingle with Muslim migrants from erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal, rank-and-file police officers find it hard to tell the difference, although there are clear differences in dialect. “You see, often our men don’t care if people are Bengali or Bangladeshi,” acknowledged one of the officers cited above. “If a cycle-rickshaw driver has a beard, that is enough.”
 
Bangladeshi Hindus, according to a September 7, 2015, notification, were not illegal migrants and were not to be proceeded against. But they have to submit an affidavit with exact date of crossing, route, address in Bangladesh and make clear that were the targets of religious persecution or fear from it.
 
This affidavit has to be submitted online to the ministry of home affairs in Delhi for a long-term visa. After six years, they can apply for citizenship. In reality, the process is either unknown or too convoluted for Hindu migrants. As of October 2017, there were 264 Hindus among 1,094 people in six detention camps, according to border police data.
 
While in detention, Molla made a friend, Guwahati mechanic Mihir Biswas, who pleaded with Molla to request his lawyer to help him, which he did. Biswas, whose father migrated from Bangladesh in 1965, married a local and made a life for himself, with a variety of backing documents, before he was arrested in a sweep for illegal immigrants. The Guwahati High Court held his detention illegal in September 2016.
 
It is primarily the poor who are targeted in these sweeps, and anyone can be stopped on the streets. Cycle-rickshaw drivers are particularly vulnerable; they made up the majority of about 20 cases of suspect citizenship that IndiaSpend investigated. Others included tenant farmers, mechanics and daily-wage labourers, mostly with a primary education or illiterate–all subject to questioning at any time and other humiliation.
 
At a foreigners tribunal, a shouting judge and barefoot litigants
 
On a hot, humid October day, down a quiet, leafy suburban Guwahati lane, a crowd of people gathered, amid nurseries, traditional wooden houses with tin roofs, and an irrigation canal. They did not notice the beauty of their surroundings, focussed as they were on proving they are Indians and ready to be humiliated if that is what it took.
 
The women were dressed in sarees–few Muslims in the state, whether Bengali or Assamese, wear hijabs–the men in lungis or in shapeless pants with loose, full-sleeved shirts. Older men had skull caps and beards, the younger men, mostly, did not. There were no fans in the narrow corridor outside the courtroom of the Ullubari foreigners tribunal, so everyone sweated profusely. They had been waiting for more than 90 minutes, but there was no sign of the judge, officially called tribunal member, who is known to arrive late every day.
 
At 11.45 am, the tribunal member–a lawyer on a two-year contract–walked in. Every litigant who went in had to leave footwear outside. The tribunal member required they stood barefoot before him. Their lawyers and court officers were exempt.
 

Litigants, almost all poor Muslims, must leave their footwear outside a court room in the Ullubari foreigners tribunal in Guwahati, Assam. Lawyers and court officers can keep footwear on.
 

Outside the courtroom that requires litigants to be barefoot, most of those asked to prove Indian citizenship are Muslim and aged, many making journeys of a few hours to appear–barefoot–for a few minutes before a tribunal member.
 
After Samad Ali, 59, left his rubber chappals and went in, the tribunal member began to shout. Ali, a tenant farmer with a primary education and weak hearing, had made it to a local Assamese channel because his citizenship was being questioned for a second time, even though he had been declared a citizen the first time. Ali and his lawyer apologised profusely, and the tribunal member said he would rule on the case next time. Two weeks later, despite his previous irritation, the member ruled that Ali was indeed an Indian.
 
Ali’s case is typical. He was declared an Indian by a foreigners tribunal in 2010, but in 2017 he was again served a notice, this time using the fact that a voter roll used the name “Abdul Samad”. Differences in names, spellings and ages–almost all the litigants IndiaSpend met were hazy about when they were born–are common failings in documents across India, but in Assam such variations can have you declared a foreigner.
 

Samad Ali, 59, a tenant farmer with a primary education, outside the Ullubari foreigners tribunal in Guwahati, Assam. Ali was declared an Indian by a foreigners tribunal in 2010, but in 2017 he was again served a notice because his name was ‘Abdul Samad’ on a voter list. He was later cleared of suspicion.
 
The variations could be as minor–Samad Ali spelled Samat Ali. Some names vary because people have incorporated their professions into their names, such as Peon, Master, Munshi. Typically, many use single names, but, for instance, a census official may have added an Ali after or an Abdul before, as was the case with Samad Ali alias Abdul Samad. In some cases, the alias was mentioned in legal documents, but many courts simply ignored variations. Some litigants are simply victims of petty harassment.
 
Across town outside a neo-natal government facility near a police station, IndiaSpend met Tuffazul Islam, selling baby clothing from a cycle. How old was he? A thin man–who said he was fat before he was arrested–with a thin moustache, Islam thought for a few seconds. “34 to 36,” he said. Three years ago, according to Islam, policemen called him to the police station and asked him for a Rs 200 bribe: “I refused, so then they took my fingerprints and said, tum bideshi ho–you are a foreigner.”
 
Six months later, a policeman delivered a notice to his cycle, demanding his presence in court with proof of citizenship. The case went on for two years. The first lawyer Islam hired charged Rs 1.3 lakh, almost all of Islam’s savings. “Bahut paisa lootliya (he looted lots of money from me),” said Islam in Bengali-accented Hindi.
 

Tuffazul Islam, who cannot remember if he is 34 or 36, spent Rs 1.3 lakh, almost all his savings, in court after local police–he refused them a bribe, he says–asked him to prove his citizenship. After two years and a change in lawyers, a foreigners tribunal accepted he was Indian. Islam sells clothes for infants from a cycle in downtown Guwahati.
 
Finally, he got to know of Aman Wadud, a 31-year-old lawyer who fights such cases pro bono, or accepts whatever clients would like to give. A tribunal judge agreed with Wadud: Islam was Indian, and his mother’s name appeared in the 1966 voters list.
 
“These are copy-paste cases,” said Wadud. “The police use the same modus operandi again and again, and the poorest people are harassed, repeatedly in many cases.”
 
At the NRC, coordinator Hajela said electoral rolls were compromised. “If I am an illegal migrant from Bangladesh, what should I first do? I will start creating documents,” said Hajela. “I will say I am son of someone whose name is on the rolls. I will adopt a father. I will get a certificate from the village headman. I will go the civil supplies department and get a ration card–they only want to know how many in my family. I can get a driving licence. With any of these documents, I can be included in the electoral rolls. That is de facto proof of citizenship. So, I cannot rely on the electoral rolls.”
 
Once the NRC verifies the 32.5 million in its database, IndiaSpend asked Hajela, will this be the definitive list, which will supersede the arbitrary sweeps of the border police and the fallibilities of foreigners’ tribunals?
 
“No,” said Hajela. Those being arrested will find no solace from being on the NRC master list.
 
Chasing ghosts, catching illegal migrants and the Bangladeshi position
 
“This makes no sense at all,” said Monirul Hussain, a retired Guwahati University professor, referring to the conflicting approach of varying arms of the government in deciding who to arrest or subject to citizenship trials. “It’s like chasing ghosts.”
 
Hussain, an Assamese Muslim, is from Lakhimpur in upper Assam, regarded as a bastion of “original” Assamese. Migrants, whether from Bengal or Bangladesh, tend to congregate in lower Assam. He recalled how police drives were even more arbitrary in the 1960s, when nearly 200,000 Bengali speakers were deported without a trial, “pushed back”–as the official term goes–across the border.
 
Hussain cited the example of a poor Muslim family rounded up by the police near his home in 1965. “The man was so nervous, and his sense of time so fluid, that when the police asked him when they had come here, he said 10 years ago,” said Hussain. “My mother said they had been around for half a century. The next morning, they were all gone. The police were given targets.”
 
Over 51 years to August 2017, 29,738 “Bangladeshis”, according to border police data shared with IndiaSpend, were “pushed back”–marched to the Bangladesh border and left there.
 
“…the practice of occasionally pushing illegal Bangladeshi immigrants back across the India-Bangladesh border has not been effective,” said this June 2016 comment from Carnegie India, a think tank. “They are either prone to re-enter voluntarily from a different porous stretch or pushed back into India by Bangladeshi border guards. Moreover, such a system of deportation is devoid of any legal strength.”
 
Today, no one talks of “pushing back” people. However flawed, there is a legal process, and Bangladesh is a friendly country. There is persistent talk, though, that the current government has given the police targets for issuing notices.
 
At his office, where updated lists of declared foreigners, detenus, convicted and released are written by hand on a white-board, Special Director General of Police R M Singh, chief of the Assam border police, dismissed talk of targets but acknowledged the possibility of wrongful legal proceedings.
 
“It is true,” said Singh, “the police are under pressure, so some of these things (harassment) do happen.” The days of crude “pushing back” are gone, he added, and deportation now implied a diplomatic process.
 
That diplomatic process precludes the possibility of millions of Bangladeshis–even if they were identified as such–being deported. In his home-cum-office in a quiet lane in central Guwahati, Kazi Muntashir Murshed, a clean-shaven young diplomat dressed in a dark, blue suit, pointed to the procedure laid out for deportation by the Vienna Convention. Once someone is identified for deportation, the Indians must notify the nearest Bangladeshi High Commission, which will then ask for consular access. A team will then interview and satisfy itself that the person is indeed a Bangladeshi and arrange for a temporary passport. What the NRC does is of no concern.
 
“Our position is that the NRC is an internal matter of the government of India,” Murshed, Bangladesh Assistant High Commissioner and Head of Mission at Guwahati, told IndiaSpend. “Theoretically.” What he implied is the fact that Bangladesh follows and is aware of the turmoil in Assam. “So far,” he said, “the government of India has not put up to Bangladesh that there are Bangladeshis in India.”
 
The Bangladesh of 1971 and today are not the same, said Murshed. Indeed, Bangladesh has overtaken India on many human-development indicators. He argued there was “no incentive for a Bangladeshi to come to Assam today”. “Our minimum wage is higher,” he said. “And if they came before 1971, then we should not talk about that. There was no Bangladesh.”
 
Citizens may become second-class citizens, the turmoil may endure
 
But in Assam, a state with India’s second-highest infant mortality rate, current politics are built around illegal immigration and the Muslim question.
 
“The Hindu rate of population growth is declining. But the Muslim rate is rising,” the Washington Post quoted Himanta Biswa Sarma, finance minister in the Assam government (and was once a minister in charge of implementing the Assam accord) as saying on November 27, 2016. “Most of the Muslims here are from Bangladesh. If this continues, the Assamese Hindus will become a minority soon; we will lose our language, our culture, our identity.”
 
That the intricacies of international realities and relations make mass deportations a dim possibility has dawned upon the government of Assam. Whatever the current urgency and momentum, the identification process will likely be in the thousands, said a senior government functionary involved in the process–requesting anonymity given the sensitivity of the issue–instead of the millions of illegal immigrants the politicians seek.
 
“This is a fool’s errand,” said the government official quoted above. “Given that mass deportations will never happen, our background discussions with the government of India are veering around to two possibilities: One, that those identified will be removed from the electoral rolls and their land rights, where applicable, rescinded. In short, most may stay on, but as second-class citizens.”
 
In a Guwahati backlane, that reality already exists for Molla, even though he is an Indian. He works at his book-binding job from dawn to after dusk, his three children are in school, but he had no idea what will become of them, and he was only dimly aware of the politics of his country.
 
What did he want from his state’s government, I asked.
 
Molla looked confused. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What will any government do for people like us?”
 
Who was the party in power anyway, I asked.
 
“The Congress?” he said, tentatively.
 
And the prime minister of India?
 
He thought for a few seconds.
 
“Moti,” he said. “Yes, Moti or something.”
 
Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously said Moinal Molla was declared a foreigner by a foreigners tribunal–the declaration was made by a magistrate’s court. He was declared a foreigner once–not twice as we earlier said. We regret the errors.
 
(Halarnkar is editor of IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post As Millions Try To Prove Citizenship In Assam, One Man’s Story Reveals Perils of Proof appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: Hindustan Times

The misuse of certain statistical ‘facts’ to stigmatise the already marginalised community of the  East Bengali origin in Assam today has become a matter of concern for all democratic Indians in Assam and elsewhere. The higher decadal growth rate of this community has been interpreted as a direct consequence of the bogey of ‘illegal infiltration’ from Bangladesh. A section of the media and a number of organisations are bent upon branding all of them with the much-abused label of "illegal infiltrators" from Bangladesh.  While poverty, illiteracy and lack of infrastructure continue to plague these people who face institutionalised as informal discrimination from the government as well as the entrenched classes. On April 3, 2017 a meeting in Delhi focused on this sticklish issue. It was organised by the Justice Forum – Assam, Delhi Action Committee for Assam.
 
Sabrangindia and Newsclick, in collaboration, bring you this Video Story from the speeches captured at the meeting. Among the prominent guests and speakers at this meeting were
Kuldeep Nayar, Veteran Journalist and Political Commentator, Sanjay Parikh, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court, Prof. Sanjay Hazarika, formerly Jamia Milia Islamia, Prof. Monirul Hussain from the Gauhati University, Prof. Dilip Bora, from the Gauhati University and Prof. Abdul Mannan, formerly from the Gauhati University.
 

The deep-seated antagonism towards these people has spread and taken over every organ of the state administrative machinery including the legislature. Evidently, there is an increasing trend to arbitrarily refer people from these marginalised communities as D-voters (doubtful voters) to Foreigners Tribunal. In a very recent example, 11 family members of the late Muhammad Amiruddin, who was the Assam Legislative Assembly’s first deputy speaker, have been referred by the border police to a Foreigners’ Tribunal as D-voters.

The central executive has stepped up the ‘popular’ resentment against these vulnerable groups, recently, through a proposed Act of Parliament that will amend the provisions of the Citizenship Act of 1955 to discriminate between ‘infiltrators’ from Bangladesh on the basis of religion, and grant citizenship to Hindus who have migrated to Assam from Bangladesh. Through a painfully slow process, various stakeholders and communities in Assam had come to a consensus to uphold the historic Assam Accord of 1985 and in the light of the Accord treat March 24, 1971 as the cut-off date to solve the question of "illegal immigration" from Bangladesh; anyone who entered Assam after midnight of March 24, 1971 would be considered a foreigner. It was also in this context that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was being updated in Assam under the supervision of the Supreme Court. However, through the proposed amendments to the Citizenship Act the present ruling dispensation is trying to break the consensus built around the Assam Accord and render the updation of NRC meaningless.

The formation of a ‘popular’ consensus against these marginalised groups especially at the behest of the state government has forced the community to a state of utter vulnerability. Forces that advocate an extreme form of nationalism today in Assam have exploited the unenviable situation of these people and they have every chance of further advancing their communal agenda by building on a certain historical construction of the community as ‘outsiders.’

The public meeting was conceived as an intervention in this communally-charged political era that condemns the Assamese Muslims of East Bengali origin to a degraded form of existence and an endless cycle of prejudice and hostility. We aim to reach out to left and democratic circles in the country and initiate a dialogue among concerned groups on how to challenge the various forms of discrimination that these people face today. Our appeal is to invite like-minded organisations and individuals to understand the historical and contemporary condition of a people who has faced assaults on their basic rights for many decades in the state.

The post The Citizenship Crisis in Assam: Questions of D-Voter, NRC and proposed amendment to Citizenship Act: VIDEOS appeared first on SabrangIndia.