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Reports have emerged that as many as 22 people were declared as “foreigners” by six Foreigners Tribunals (FT) functioning in the Bengali-dominated Cachar district of Assam in the month of December 2021. Of the 22, 19 are Bengali-speaking Hindus and the rest Bengali-speaking Muslims.
This development comes despite the Assam government having directed the FTs last September to not pass “consequential directions or orders” and stick to giving “opinion” on a person’s nationality.
Foreigners Tribunals, which are quasi-judicial in nature and are unique to Assam, decide the fate of people suspected to be illegal immigrants. Foreigners’ Order, 1964, empowers FTs to only opine whether a person is a foreigner or an Indian citizen.
The six FTs of Cachar (there are 100 FTs in Assam) declared the 22 men and women as “foreigners” in separate judgments and on different dates in December 2021.
The additional Superintendent of Police (Border) of the district sent a letter to the District Magistrate (Cachar) with a list of the new “foreigners”. He said all the public welfare schemes of the Centre such as ration cards, Aadhaar cards and so on would be taken away from the persons included in the list. Their names would also be deleted from the voter list.
North East Linguistic and Ethnic Co-ordination Committee general secretary Kankan Narayan Sikdar said that due to the non-enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019, for two years, Bengali Hindus in particular were facing extreme harassment in the name of identification of “foreigners”.
“Declaring a total of 22 people, including 19 Bengali Hindus in the district ‘foreigners’ in one month is really painful. The coordination committee will co-operate with the persons in the case challenging the verdicts of the FTs in the high court and prove that they are Indians,” he added.
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