Assam is weaponising a Partition-era law to let officials strip those accused of being illegal migrants of citizenship and expel them in 24 hours—a new model of extra-judicial mass disenfranchisement that may now spread across the country.

On 9 September 2025, the Assam cabinet approved the framing of a new set of “standard operating procedures” (SOP), as the new plan is called in officialese, under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to identify, detain and expel supposed illegals. 

The announcement came two months after the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced during a press conference that his government would now invoke the 1950 law to expel ‘illegal migrants’ without relying on the existing Foreigners Tribunals (FT) system. 

The SOP, according to the government’s press release, will empower district commissioners (DC) across Assam to summon suspected illegals, demand evidence of their Indian citizenship, make a decision on their citizenship status and finally, order their expulsion or detention within 24 hours. 

The DCs will also separately have the power to order the expulsion of those “declared foreign nationals” (DFNs) by an FT. The SOP, further, seeks to formalise the ongoing “pushbacks”—forcing suspected illegals across the border, often at gun point—to Bangladesh “without any further process”.

The proposed SOP is only the latest manifestation of a distinct form of legal lawlessness that the Sarma-led Assam government has been perfecting over the last few months as part of its multi-pronged offensive against the state’s Bengali Muslim minority. 

Majoritarian Lawfare

You can call the Sarma’s plan majoritarian lawfare, designed and executed with the specific intent of driving fear and anxiety among religious minorities while unifying the Hindutva vote bank in the run up to next year’s assembly election. 

The Sarma government has argued that an October 2024 Supreme Court judgement on the Assam-specific section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955 allows it to freely use the 1950 act to expel illegals. But, this is legal cherry-picking, done with the political intent to justify an unjustifiable policy. 

As a legal commentator at the Centre for Justice and Peace (CJP), a human rights and legal aid group working closely on the Assam context, has argued, the apex court saw the 1950 act as part of the existing FT-centred regime of foreigner detection in the state, and not as something that can substitute or override the tribunal process. 

In other words, the Sarma government has used the most orthodox and draconian reading of the bench’s opinion to rationalise its expulsion policy.

The Sarma government, in bypassing longstanding legal norms, also intends to position itself as an intrepid leader of an exasperated and impatient majority who has no time for a slow-moving judicial system.

In this context, the proposed SOP reflects an incremental mutation of the Assam government’s stance towards the judicial framework on citizenship determination—from compliance to acquiescence to rejection. 

It marks the rise of an authoritarian executive state in which powerful political forces can use their popular mandate to sideline the judiciary (and constitutional law) on their whim. This is a subversion of the delicate relationship between the legislature, executive and judiciary, which is fundamental to the integrity of any modern constitutional democracy.

Escalation Of Illiberal Intent

While the new SOP mirrors the existing FT regime in many ways, it is an escalation of illiberal intent and action around citizenship determination. As a domain of law, citizenship determination is complex and carries high stakes because it can have devastating consequences on the lives of vulnerable individuals. 

Therefore, the process demands cautious scrutiny of documentary evidence by trained judicial officers. 

By allowing bureaucrats who have no judicial training or any experience in the specialized field of citizenship determination to dabble in it freely, the government is formalising a thoroughly discretionary, opaque and arbitrary regime of large-scale disenfranchisement. 

It also appears from the cabinet note that legal safeguards, such as the right to appeal, are completely absent in this new regime. It is not difficult to see how such a system would create precarity at a mass scale.

To be clear, the quasi-judicial FT system in Assam too is arbitrary, opaque and discretionary—as a July 2025 report by the National Law School of India University Bangalore and Queen Mary University of London confirms. It, too, is manned by untrained or ill-trained members who play fast and loose with judicial norms while adjudicating on citizenship matters. 

Overseen by the Assam government’s home and political department, it too is an executive institution without any legislative provenance. Yet, the FT regime offers some semblance, even if illusionary, of institutional justice. Individuals suspected of being trespassers are able to defend themselves through lawyers in front of a bench and subsequently, appeal at higher courts to challenge adverse orders. 

Obliterating Judicial Culture

Lawyers themselves are able to learn through precedence, even if inconsistently, to defend their clients. The new bureaucratic regime seeks to obliterate even that minimalist judicial culture by vesting all decision-making powers on the district administration. 

While the FTs would continue to operate on the side, the proposed SOP reveals a larger political intent on the BJP’s part to eventually scale it down. 

Once DCs take on the task of identifying DFNs, the FT regime would lose its relevance, which could then serve as an administrative rationale for the state government to defund it. Sure, the quasi-judicial FTs must be abolished—but not if they are replaced by a non-judicial and arguably anarchic regime of citizenship determination. 

Indeed, the executive system could end up transplanting the competitive, performance-based system of the FT regime into the bureaucracy. DCs would now be under pressure to produce illegal foreigners out of thin air just to demonstrate their administrative performance and avail lucrative promotions. Such a system would actively encourage, rather than prevent, disenfranchisement.

Absurd & Cruel

If the overall structure wasn’t bad enough, specific provisions in the proposed SOP are both absurd and cruel. They give the suspected ‘illegal’ merely 10 days to prove their Indian citizenship to the DC—a painfully short period of time to prove documentary citizenship, especially for the unlettered and marginalized. 

Over the years, thousands have presented reams of convoluted paperwork before the FTs to prove their Indian citizenship (here, here and here), only to be de-nationalised and in some cases, detained or deported. If a quasi-judicial institution failed to judge documentary evidence on their merit (as also once observed by the Gauhati High Court), how can then one expect non-judicial authorities, like DCs, to justly and transparently ascertain the citizenship of people?

The proposed SOP further empowers the DCs to order the expulsion of DFNs assuming that “no identification process is necessary” in their case as “they may have already exhausted remedies available by approaching the High Court and the Supreme Court.” 

This is a serious leap of judgment. 

What if a DFN has an appeal pending at one of these courts? Can the district administration still expel them? 

By keeping the language broad and vague, the proposed SOP could justify a sweeping expulsion regime that subverts the judicial appeal process itself—as has already reportedly happened in Assam with the forced expulsion of Bengali Muslims who have cases pending at higher courts. 

The proposed SOP also expects an individual identified as a foreigner to “remove himself”. One wonders if the government wants people to just pack up and walk into Bangladesh—an impossible prospect for someone who may not have any intergenerational links, family or friends across the border. 

An Arbitrary, Carceral Regime

The proposed SOP seeks to formalise the term ‘holding centre’ to replace ‘Transit Camp’, which is what the government currently calls the sole foreigner detention centre in Assam’s Goalpara district. 

Police in some other BJP-ruled states are now using the term “holding centre” to characterise facilities used to detain suspected “illegal immigrants”. 

Such strategic use of bureaucratic language is aimed at creating an arbitrary and informal carceral regime that does not have to fulfil the legal denotations of “detention” or “transit”, terms generally used for individuals awaiting formal deportation to other countries.

It is also important to highlight how the Assam SOP plays on historical trauma. The 1950 act, designed to deter cross-border migration of people from East Pakistan to Assam after the 1947 Partition, was a response, perhaps even an overreaction, to ethno-nationalist anxieties rippling through a landscape battered by sectarian violence and hatred. 

By invoking the same act, the BJP government appears to be suggesting to its wider electorate that it will finish the unfinished task of the Partition by sending Bengali Muslims back to ‘their own country’ across the Radcliffe Line. 

This is, of course, a perverse extrapolation of history, but is in line with the larger politics of Hindutva, which seeks to weaponise the Partition to justify the creation of a Hindu rashtra or Hindu nation. In the process, the festering wounds of 1947 continue to singe deeper into India’s body politic.

Inspiring Other States

The Assam model of citizenship determination through executive force is already being replicated in other BJP-ruled states where governments are directing district authorities to identify and expel suspected illegals without relying on any judicial or quasi-judicial authority. 

Other aspects of the model are appearing elsewhere. The Election Commission of India is planning a countrywide voter roll revision, replicating Assam’s longstanding doubtful-voter model. 

“Holding centres”, mirroring Assam’s detention centre, have popped up in the National Capital Region and following a recent union home ministry directive, are soon likely to surface in other states too. 

We see the emergence of a mutually reinforcing regime of disenfranchisement in which Assam and other states learn from each other to find the most effective and quickest way to remove the undesirable other. 

(Angshuman Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. He is also a Board Member at the Development and Justice Initiative.)

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