Assam allows district authorities, police to expel ‘illegal migrants’, bypass foreigner tribunals

The Assam Cabinet on Tuesday approved the framing of a standard operating procedure under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act, which grants power to district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the foreigners tribunals.

Currently, cases pertaining to undocumented migrants are handled by foreigners tribunals.

The announcement on Tuesday came months after Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma informed the Assembly in June that the state government was planning to invoke the 1950 law to “push back” more suspected foreigners.

Since the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, the police in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asked them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

In his statement in June, Sarma had claimed that the expulsion of declared foreigners was justified in the legal framework provided by the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

The chief minister had said that the Supreme Court in October 2024 upheld Section 6A of the 1955 Citizenship Act, which gave “sweeping powers to the Assam government” to act under the 1950 law and that a deputy commissioner has the power to evict any person if there is prime facie evidence of him or her being an “illegal foreigner”.

In October 2024, the court had upheld the constitutional validity of Section 6A of the 1955 Citizenship Act.

The section was introduced as a special provision under the Act when the Assam Accord was signed between the Union government and leaders of the Assam Movement in 1985. It allows foreigners who came to Assam between January 1, 1966, and March 25, 1971, to seek Indian citizenship.

Indigenous groups in Assam have alleged that this provision in the Act had legalised infiltration by migrants from Bangladesh.

After a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Sarma said that the standard operating procedure to use the 1950 Act had been approved, which would, to a large extent, “nullify” the role of the foreigners tribunals, The Indian Express reported.

Foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. However, the tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

The tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

As per the standard operating procedure, if a district commissioner receives information from the police or other sources that a person is suspected to be an “illegal immigrant”, the official will direct the person to produce evidence of his citizenship within 10 days, Sarma said on social media.

If the district commissioner finds that the evidence submitted is not satisfactory, he can pass an expulsion order by invoking the 1950 Act, ordering the removal of the undocumented immigrant from Assam “by giving 24 hours’ time and by the route so specified”, the chief minister added.

“…We will immediately take this person to a holding centre, and from there the BSF [Border Security Force] will push them back to Bangladesh or Pakistan,” The Indian Express quoted Sarma as saying.

“Only a confusing case in which the DC [district commissioner] cannot come to a decision, if DC can’t prima facie conclude that the person is a foreigner, will it go to the FT [foreigners tribunals],” he said.

An order issued by the Union home ministry on September 1 said that if the foreigners do not have valid travel documents, the authorities should get their nationality verified through the diplomatic missions of the home country to deport the persons “as soon as the travel document is received”.

A brief history of the 1950 Act

Partition and subsequent communal riots led to a movement of refugees and other migrants into Assam from East Pakistan. According to a 2012 white paper by the Assam government, around 5 lakh migrants and refugees entered the state in the initial years.

As popular discontent grew about the migration into Assam, the Union government brought in a law – the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act – to tackle the presence of alleged foreigners.

The law empowered the government to expel “a person or a class of persons”, who were “ordinarily resident outside India and have come into Assam, if it believes that their stay “is detrimental to the interests of the general public of India”.

However, the law gave relief to refugees fleeing Pakistan on account of “civil disturbances or fear of such disturbances”, given the context of Partition.

Between 1962 and 1964, the police began a crackdown on alleged foreigners. Experts said that the Act was the only legislation at that time that could give power to the government.

The drive soon stirred up a storm. “The process of detection and deportation was so atrocious that … Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, an Asamiya Muslim, who was then finance minister of Assam, and later became Union minister and president of India, had to take up the issue of atrocities and inhuman torture meted out to the innocent Indian Muslim citizens,” wrote political scientist Monirul Hussian in his book Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity.

Ahmed threatened to resign over the harassment of those wrongly accused of being foreigners.

According to the Assam government’s white paper on the foreigners’ matter, Pakistan also threatened to drag the issue of deportation to the United Nations.

Eventually, it was “decided by the central government that before eviction every individual case should be examined by judicial authority...to stand the test of scrutiny before the international forum”, the white paper said.

In effect, the contentious implementation of the 1950 legislation opened the doors to Assam’s most important citizenship determination mechanism – the foreigners tribunals. Four such tribunals were set up by a statutory order on September 23, 1964, and more were to follow.

Legal experts argue that the Sarma government, by invoking the 1950 law, was dragging the state back to the days of arbitrary expulsions, without even the “fig leaf” of due process provided by the foreigners tribunals.

Also read: Why experts contest Assam CM’s use of 1950 law to justify forcing out people into Bangladesh