The Assam government has instructed the state police to cease pursuing cases against persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who are members of the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, and Christian communities and who entered the country prior to December 31, 2014. These individuals are eligible for Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which went into effect on March 11 of this year.
The home and political departments of Assam wrote a letter to the border wing of the state police advising them to apply for Indian citizenship instead of taking their cases to the foreigners’ tribunal.
Indian citizenship is available to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, and Parsis who entered India on or before December 31, 2014, as per the Citizenship by Agreement (CAA).
The home and political department wrote a letter to the border police on July 5th stating that “in view of the above provision of law, the border police may not forward cases of persons belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi, Jain, and Christian communities who entered India prior to December 31, 2014, directly to foreigners’ tribunals.”
It stated that such individuals must be counseled to apply for Indian citizenship and that a separate file must be kept on them.
“However, this differential treatment will not be available to persons who entered Assam from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan after December 31, 2014, irrespective of their religion. Once detected, they should be straight away forwarded to the jurisdictional foreigners’ tribunal for further action,” the letter by Partha Pratim Majumdar, secretary (home and political) to special DGP (Border), Harmeet Singh, said.
Foreigners’ tribunals are Assamese-only quasi-judicial organisations that determine whether or not individuals whose names are absent from the state’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) or who are thought to be undocumented immigrants are Indian. At the moment, the state has one hundred of these tribunals.
The Assam Police’s border unit is tasked with locating and expelling unauthorised persons. Additionally, they forward cases involving individuals believed to be undocumented immigrants to foreigners’ tribunals, which make determinations about an individual’s Indian identity based on documentation.
Before the Civil Aviation Act came into effect, everybody who entered Assam after March 24, 1971, regardless of their religious affiliation, was considered an illegal immigrant. The deadline for individuals from the six designated communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan has now been extended to December 31, 2014.
People who could provide documentation proving they or their ancestors had been in Assam prior to the March 1971 deadline were included as Indians in the NRC, which was published in August 2019. Those who could not provide this proof were removed, numbering over 1.9 million.
In December 2019, Assam had violent protests against the CAA, which led to five police shooting deaths. While the resistance to the CAA in other regions of India focused on the exclusion of Muslims from its scope, in Assam, the focus was on preventing non-Muslim illegal immigrants from obtaining citizenship.
Many in the state believed that the CAA’s provisions violated the principles of the 1985 Assam Accord, which guaranteed that illegal immigration would cease, regardless of the immigrants’ religious affiliations. The implementation of the CAA, according to a number of groups and indigenous associations, may result in an inflow of undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh, endangering the local population’s language, culture, and land holdings.
Indeed, on July 11, the Supreme Court overturned a foreigner’s tribunal ruling, ruling that the government could not arbitrarily select an individual and require them to provide proof of citizenship. Judges Vikram Nath and Ahsanuddin Amanullah’s bench declared that “it cannot be left to the untrammelled or arbitrary discretion of the authorities to initiate proceedings” that could have grave and perhaps life-altering repercussions for an individual in the lack of basic/primary material.
