Assam Labourer's 15 Documents Fail to Prove Citizenship in High Court

Days after the External Affairs Ministry clarified that a passport alone does not prove citizenship, a 38-year-old daily-wage labourer from Assam failed to convince the Gauhati High Court that 15 other documents were sufficient to establish him as an Indian national.

On June 30, a bench of Justice Kalyan Rai Surana and Justice Shamima Jahan upheld the order of a Foreigners' Tribunal (FT) that declared Aminul Hoque a non-citizen. The court cited inconsistencies in the documents he submitted to claim Indian citizenship.

The court held that the 15 documents did not help him “establish that he has been able to discharge his burden,” as required under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946. This section places the onus of proving citizenship on the person whose Indian status is in doubt.

Mr. Hoque, a daily-wage labourer, had been declared a foreigner by FT No. 4 of Kamrup (Metropolitan) district on February 28, 2019. He challenged this order in the High Court, producing documents that included a copy of the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) featuring his father and grandparents, voter identity cards, a permanent account number, a school certificate, and an original land purchase deed from 1973.

During the hearing, Mr. Hoque's father identified the petitioner as his son. However, the court ruled that a written statement and oral testimony, without “admissible and relevant” documentary evidence, were insufficient under the Foreigners Act.

Referring to a previous judgment, the court noted that an NRC extract is inadmissible to prove domicile in India. It observed that the 1951 NRC copy was a computer-generated printout lacking a certificate as required by Section 65B of the Evidence Act, 1872.

The court also highlighted that the sale deed from 1973 was discarded by the tribunal because there was no explanation of whether the land still existed or why it had not devolved to Mr. Hoque's grandfather's legal heirs. The court concluded that the petitioner failed to show any patent error by the tribunal in evaluating the evidence.

“…the court finds no material to hold that the opinion assailed in this writ petition is bad on facts or in law. The petitioner could not show that the said opinion was perverse on any count whatsoever. Therefore, this challenge fails, and consequently, this writ petition is dismissed,” the order stated.

The quasi-judicial Foreigners' Tribunals decide cases based on the cut-off date of March 24, 1971, for citizenship, as prescribed by the Assam Accord of 1985. The accord ended a six-year agitation against “illegal immigrants,” primarily from Bangladesh.

In 2025, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Assam government began using provisions of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to bypass the FTs and push back those deemed to be foreigners to Bangladesh.