Why Assam’s detention centre is filling up again

For several Mondays in August, Gulzar Ali accompanied his 65-year-old father to the police station to answer the summons of the border police.

“They took his signature and allowed him to return every time,” said Gulzar Ali, who lives in a village in lower Assam’s Barpeta district, which is home to a significant number of Muslims of Bengali-origin.

On September 2, however, his father, Kitab Ali, went to the police station alone. From there, he was taken to the office of the superintendent of police in Barpeta district. “I rushed to the SP office and found that many others had been detained with him,” Gulzar said.

A few hours later, Kitab Ali and 27 other people, including nine women, were loaded onto a bus and taken to a detention centre in Goalpara district. Officially called the Matia transit camp, it currently holds all of Assam’s declared foreigners, many of whom are Bengali-origin Muslims.

A renewed crackdown by the Assam government on residents like Ali, who failed to prove their citizenship before foreigners’ tribunals, is filling up the Matia detention centre in Goalpara district. All of the 28 people sent to the centre in September were Bengali-origin Muslims.

The community’s presence in Assam dates back to more than a century, when the British encouraged the migration of Muslim peasants from undivided Bengal.

But many of its members, despite belonging to families that have lived in Assam for generations, lack documents to prove this.

As a result, they end up being declared foreigners by tribunals that decide citizenship matters in Assam through an opaque and often arbitrary process. In several cases, higher courts have struck down tribunal orders that pronounced someone a foreigner because of minor discrepancies in spellings or even without hearing their side.

In May 2022, Kitab Ali lost his case at a tribunal that found that the documents submitted “were not sufficient and trustworthy to prove” that he is an Indian citizen.

Ali’s family members believe that the tribunal had erred in its decision. They pointed out that no other member of Kitab Ali’s family faces any citizenship cases, and that all their names were included in the National Register of Citizens updated in Assam in 2019. “All my uncles are Indian. How come my father became a foreigner?” asked Gulzar Ali, the 30-year-old daily wager, when Scroll met him at his home in Lachanga village. “For the last month, I have been running around to collect the certified copies of the documents so as to challenge the FT order.”

In another village, 75-year-old Ibrahim Talukdar had been similarly rounded up.

Three years ago, a foreigners’ tribunal had decided Talukdar was a foreigner.

As proof of his citizenship, Ibrahim Talukdar had submitted voter lists from 1966 and 1970 featuring his father Khalil Talukdar’s name – proof that the family was resident in Assam before March 24, 1971, which is the cut-off date beyond which migrants to the state are not considered Indian citizens.

However, the tribunal rejected the voter lists, arguing they were “unauthenticated”, “uncertified” and “inadmissible”.

According to his family, Ibrahim Talukdar was born in Assam in 1950, which is attested by a village headman certificate, and his name has figured in a voter list from 1985.

“Because of minor mistakes in names and discrepancies in age in our grandfather’s documents, the court declared him a foreigner,” his son Saidur Talukdar, told Scroll.

“What would they get by sending an old man to a detention camp? We don’t get any benefits from the government. They should at least allow us to live,” said his wife Asma Khatun.

‘The detention model’

Till a few years ago, those declared foreigners in Assam were confined for long periods in six detention centres in the state’s prisons, in appalling living conditions.

As on 25 September 2018, a total of 1,037 declared foreigners were being held in the detention centres.

However, the number came down, following a Supreme Court order in May 2019, which said that declared foreigners cannot be held indefinitely and may be released after three years of imprisonment.

In November 2022, the Gauhati High Court directed the state government to move all detained foreigners from prisons to the Matia transit camp.

India’s largest detention centre for “illegal migrants”, the Matia transit camp was sanctioned by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government in 2018 and was opened last year.

By May this year, the number of declared foreigners at the camp had gone down to 17.

With the new round of arrests, the number has shot up to 72, as of September 18.

Of the fresh detainees, 28 have been arrested after August 14, when the Gauhati High Court asked why the government had not been arresting those declared foreigners.

The court observation became the pretext for the government to issue fresh directions to the police.

Activists and lawyers point out that this also coincides with the Assam chief minister deploying heightened rhetoric against alleged Bangladeshis while campaigning for his party for the upcoming Jharkhand Assembly elections.

“The chief minister is trying to sell the Assam NRC to other states heading for elections,” said an advocate of the Gauhati High Court, who has argued several citizenship cases.

As the Bharatiya Janata Party’s in-charge for Jharkhand elections, Sarma has carried out a shrill campaign against so-called “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh and stoked fears of “demographic change” in the tribal state. He also promised to “kick out infiltrators” from Jharkhand and implement the NRC in the state.

Between 2015 and 2019, the National Register of Citizens was updated in Assam. The exercise to detect “illegal immigrants” led to the exclusion of 19 lakh people, who now face a potential stateless future.

“For his agenda, he must create [a spectre] of illegal migrants in Assam. The detention model serves him as a tool to this end,” the advocate said.

A court order, and government crackdown

The arrest of the 28 Bengali-origin Muslim residents came weeks after a letter written by a senior advocate, who represents the home department, to the Assam director general of police.

The letter, dated August 14, sought urgent action on orders passed by the foreigners’ tribunals as far back as 2014 and 2017, Scroll has learnt.

It asked all pending orders to be executed promptly, particularly those concerning the arrest of those who failed to prove their citizenship.

As soon as one is declared a foreigner by the foreigners’ tribunals, an order is forwarded to a senior border police official so that the person is arrested and sent to the Matia transit camp. However, not all persons declared foreigners are promptly arrested.

“There are many more instances of inaction by the police and authorities,” a senior advocate, who represents the government in the high court, told Scroll.

The trigger for the letter from the police official was a remark by a Gauhati High Court bench on August 14. The court strongly criticised the advocates representing the foreigners’ tribunals asking why the government has not been arresting those declared foreigners. “What is going on? What is the point of this exercise if the government is not willing to carry it to the logical end [of arrest]?”

Ironically, the high court’s observations came in a case involving a person who had been declared a foreigner by a tribunal through an ex-parte order – that is, without having heard out the accused’s arguments. The person had moved the high court, asking it to quash the order.

“They pulled us up very badly and asked what is the police doing?” the senior government advocate told Scroll.

The government responded by sending directions to the police through the letter. “This lack of action is leading to considerable embarrassment for the counsels defending the home department in court as they struggle to provide satisfactory explanations for the delays in executing these [foreigner tribunals’ orders] … The situation not only undermines the credibility of the department, but also hampers the effective enforcement of the tribunals’ decisions,” the letter said.

“This is also one of the reasons why now the declared foreigners are being searched and they have been put behind bars,” the senior advocate said.

Soon after, the border police also sent a spate of notices to Bengali Muslim residents to appear before the foreigners’ tribunals to prove their citizenship, several activists and lawyers told Scroll.

Indeed, days after the detention of 28 Muslims, the chief minister had said the process of detecting foreigners in Assam, which was almost put on hold because of the NRC exercise, is being revived.

No notices have been sent to Bengali Hindus – another community that has often found itself in the crosshairs of Assam’s complex citizenship regime – as the state government has explicitly asked the border police not to act against non-Muslims who entered India illegally before 2014.

Mistaken identity

The process of detecting foreigners in Assam has been sharply criticised for being arbitrary, discriminatory, loaded against the poor, especially Bengal-origin Muslims – and riddled with errors.

For example, among the 28 people sent to the Matia detention centre in September was Anowar Hussain, a resident of Dimapur village in Barpeta district.

According to his lawyer and families, Hussain was arrested in a case of “mistaken identity”.

Hussain had been summoned by the border police because of an ex parte order – a judgement passed without hearing the accused – in March 2018, in which the foreigners’ tribunal had declared the accused, also named Anowar Hussain, a foreigner.

But while the indicted person was from Ghugubari village in Barpeta district, it was Hussain who was sent to the detention centre.

On September 23, his advocate moved a habeas corpus petition at the Gauhati High Court, asking for his release. “There is no case against our client,” advocate AK Azad said. “The confusion arises as they have the similar name.”

Flawed process

Such errors are not very uncommon. For one, the border police, tasked with identifying foreigners, often act on unreliable “local inputs”.

In many cases, a person is unaware that she is under investigation and foreigners’ tribunals often end up declaring her a foreigner even without hearing her side.

The tribunals themselves have been called out for their discriminatory practices, particularly against Bengali Muslims. Their proceedings are often shrouded in secrecy and lack transparency. As Scroll had reported earlier, tribunal members are even incentivised to declare more people as foreigners.

The evaluation of a person’s citizenship often hinges on bureaucratic complexities and errors in government documents, which disproportionately impact poorer communities who may lack the resources or knowledge to rectify these discrepancies.

“Illiteracy, poverty and lack of awareness have led to these people being victimised and these are the main reasons that they fail to prove their citizenship,” a Dhubri-based activist Habibul Bepari told Scroll.

Bepari was critical of the renewed arrests of Bengali-origin Muslims declared foreigners. “They are being put behind bars in a most inhumane way,” said Bepari. “It seems like a systematic way to crush a community, from citizenship issues to eviction.”

Since India does not have an agreement with Bangladesh to deport alleged illegal immigrants, the process of detection and detention leads to no closure – and endless harassment and suspicion of Bengal-origin Muslims. “The government is merely keeping people busy with their notifications,” the government advocate, quoted above, said. “[They want to] keep the issue alive for political gain. The saddest part is… there’s no logical conclusion to these cases. It is a complete waste of judicial time and resources.”