Northeastern View | How Assam’s citizenship deprivation regime abets unjust forced deportations

It is incumbent on the Supreme Court to take a comprehensive look at the existing system of citizenship deprivation in Assam.

On May 16, the Supreme Court of India asked the central government to take “immediate steps” to deport 17 people declared foreigners by Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals (FT) and are currently lodged in a foreigner detention centre – officially known as a ‘Transit Camp’ – in the state’s Goalpara district.

The two contrasting orders within the same week from the same court have, once again, brought to sharp relief the disparate character and adverse consequences of Assam's distinct “foreigner detection” regime, (Subhendu Ghosh / Hindustan Times)

Less than a week later, another bench of the court, headed by the Chief Justice of India, halted the deportation of Maya Rani Barman, who belongs to the Rajbongshi community and was declared a foreigner by one of Assam’s many FTs in 2019.

The two contrasting orders within the same week from the same court have, once again, brought to sharp relief the disparate character and adverse consequences of Assam's distinct “foreigner detection” regime, which has pushed countless lives into an abyss of uncertainty. They especially reveal the lingering threat of forced deportations built into this system, which top courts have done little to address.

Disenfranchisement in numbers

In Assam, the quasi-judicial FT regime, by virtue of a 1964 executive order, has the power to create a special category of non-citizens called “Declared Foreigners” or “Declared Foreign Nationals (DFN)”. These are distinct from the “Convicted Foreign Nationals (CFN)” who are marked out as such by regular judicial courts for entering India without valid papers and thus, violating the Foreigners Act, 1946.

DFNs, on the other hand, are punished for a different reason – for failing to convince one of Assam’s 100 FTs that they are genuine Indian citizens after being summoned on mere suspicion of being illegal foreigners. No other state has FTs and thus also, such a unique category of citizenship deprivation. FT summons can be based on direct references by the state’s border police or another Assam-specific provision of electoral disenfranchisement, known as the “Doubtful (D-) Voter” system.

In February, Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, told the state assembly that FTs had declared 1.59 lakh people foreigners as of December 2023. As many as 96,987 people had been marked as D-Voters between 1997 and 2023, he further revealed.

Among them, over 89,000 were later removed from the negative list. He also said that 26,144 D-Voters had received FT notices while 11,819 cases were “pending”.

Last September, state cabinet minister, Atul Bora, revealed that 30,089 “illegal foreigners” had been deported as of August 31, 2023. But, the same month, chief minister Sarma gave a very different number for those deported since 2001: 3,100.

It is likely that Bora included pre-2001 deportations, which might have happened after Assamese agitators signed an accord with New Delhi in 1985 resulting in the Parliament inserting an Assam-specific provision for identification (and deportation) of post-1971 migrants in the Citizenship Act, 1955.

This constellation of statistics is indicative of the industrial scale at which Assam’s foreigner detection regime operates, often with arbitrariness and without accountability. It also reflects deeper demographic anxieties about “outsiders” – what Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “fear of small numbers” – hardwired into Assam’s political life.

Unsubstantiated and wild figures are often thrown around to bolster these fears. Earlier in May, for instance, Sarma announced at an election rally in Jharkhand that “infiltrators” from Bangladesh made up 1.25 crore – or approximately 34% – of Assam’s population.

Threat of deportation

It is worth noting why the CJI-led bench stayed Maya Rani Barman’s deportation to Bangladesh — she was born in Cooch Behar in West Bengal and later moved to Assam after marriage. She told the court that she was unable to maintain all her documents not just because she migrated to another state but also because the floods in Assam destroyed them. The court duly acknowledged this.

In effect, Barman is likely an Indian citizen who was merely unable to prove her documentary citizenship because of extraordinary circumstances. Yet, if not for the apex court’s intervention, she could have been deported to Bangladesh – a country that is perhaps wholly unfamiliar to her. Her case is symptomatic of a larger malaise in Assam’s citizenship determination regime, which often ends up forcibly deporting genuine Indian citizens to an alien foreign country because of documentary lapses.

Therefore, the other order by the court to deport the 17 DFNs lodged in the Goalpara ‘transit camp’ is deeply worrying. If the centre does go ahead with it, a set of genuine Indian citizens with no roots in Bangladesh would end up in a foreign land. In order to do so, however, New Delhi would first have to request the Bangladeshi High Commission in India to approve the return list. This is unlikely to happen as Dhaka does not officially acknowledge the presence of “illegal Bangladeshis” in Assam, save for some select cases of CFNs.

Further, India and Bangladesh do not have anything resembling a ‘deportation treaty’ or a bilateral migrant return policy at the moment. This is largely because of political divergences on both sides over the divisive issue of “illegal trespassers.” However, there is hardly a case for putting in place such a treaty as it might rationalise the mass deportation of genuine Indian citizens de-nationalised on dubious grounds to Bangladesh.

Instead, it is incumbent on the Supreme Court to take a comprehensive look at the existing system of citizenship deprivation in Assam to prevent a repeat of cases like those of Barman. There is enough evidence to indicate that the FT regime is plagued with systemic faults and judicial negligence. For starters, it should revisit the case of the 17 DFNs to assess if they really deserve to be deported to an alien land.

Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research, and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.