Guwahati, Assam: It was another day of navigating the fear of being arrested for 46-year-old Monowara Khatun. 

Since she was declared a “foreigner” in 2022 by a Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT) in her home district of Barpeta, some 90 km west of Assam’s capital, Guwahati, her family of five has rarely breathed relief.

First established in 1964, the hundred Foreigner Tribunals—that only exist in Assam—are quasi-judicial bodies that determine a person's citizenship status.

Khatun’s fear, however, was soon realised. 

In the early hours of 20 December 2024, hours before her case was to be heard in the morning before the Gauhati High Court, the Barpeta police arrived at her home in the riverine Satrakanara village to arrest her. 

“She was taken away to the local police station almost instantly, leaving no time for our three children to say goodbye,” Asur Uddin, Khatun’s husband, said over the phone. 

The same day, Khatun, along with 23 others, was sent to the sprawling transit camp at Matia, on the south bank of the Brahmaputra river in Goalpara district, which lies on the south-western border of Barpeta, according to a government affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court on 3 February 2025. 

The “transit camp”—a detention facility that houses “declared foreigners” and “illegal immigrants” until they can be deported—is India's largest detention centre, spread across 25 bighas (roughly 16 acres) of land, since it opened in January 2023.

This was the second large-scale transportation of declared “foreigners” from Barpeta to the Rs 64-crore detention facility in 2024.

Khatun is one of 63 Bengali-speaking Muslims that the tribunals have identified as DFNs (declared foreign nationals) who currently face deportation to Bangladesh.

In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court on 20 March 2025, the Assam government said that of the 63 DFNs identified between 31 October 2023 to 3 Feb 2025, 33 of them have claimed that they are Indian nationals who were wrongly declared foreigners by FTs—29 with the Gauhati High Court and four with the Supreme Court challenging the tribunal and High Court orders against their citizenship status.

Article 14 found, through looking at 15 FT orders and 19 High Court orders upholding the FT orders—covering 34 people—that at least eight declared foreigners without their presence at the tribunals and at least seven were declared foreigners despite presenting certificates issued by their village headman, land deeds and witness statements that they were Indian. 

Three of them were declared foreigners over minor discrepancies in dates, their families claimed. The FT orders accessed by Article 14 backed up this claim. 

Families of two DFNs claimed that police had fabricated Bangladeshi addresses for them. 

Article 14 checked the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—and found that at least eight were listed as Indian citizens in the final draft list published in 2019. 

The 1946 Foreigners Act, places the burden of proving citizenship on individuals accused of being foreigners, rather than the state, and many cannot afford to do so.

“Challenging [Foreigners] tribunal cases in Assam is a costly affair,” an advocate representing some of the 63 DFNs at the Gauhati High Court told Article 14. “The poor fighting such cases find it difficult to access legal aid.”

At least eight of them are currently in detention in the Matia camp, while the 55 are on conditional bail, having been released between October 2023 and May 2025.

DNFs released on conditional bail are required to furnish a bail bond of Rs 5000, report to their local police station once a week and have their biometrics—iris scans and fingerprints—recorded.

The Indian administration's recent push to deport the DFNs to a country that is unlikely to accept them because there is no deportation treaty between India and Bangladesh has left them in limbo. They are not recorded as citizens of that country, effectively making them stateless.

Those Border Security Force (BSF) allegedly “pushed back” to Bangladesh from Assam in the recent crackdown are an older batch of DFNs. Their entry into Bangladesh was resisted by the Border Guard Bangladesh, leaving them trapped in no-man’s land, as these people identified themselves as Indian nationals. (Those pushed back were not accepted by Bangladesh, left on the border, with BSF bringing at least 4 people home.)

In a hearing on 4 February 2025, while arguing in the Supreme Court for Rajendra Das, a DFN facing deportation, senior advocate Colin Gonzalves said Bangladesh does not accept DFNs as citizens unless they complete their national verification status (NSV).

NSV is a diplomatic process in which the state government shares information about a suspected foreign citizen with the MEA, which then verifies their citizenship status with their home country's high commission, clearing the ground for deportation. 

Crackdown

On 14 August 2024, while hearing the case of Md. Abul Kasem Ali vs Union of India, the Gauhati High Court chided the state for not arresting individuals declared foreigners by the tribunals, saying, “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]?

In February 2025, the Supreme Court directed the state government to deport DFNs to their “foreign country” while hearing the ongoing Rajendra Das petition on the “arbitrary detention” of people in detention centres “who cannot possibly be deported to any foreign country in the foreseeable future”.

The chief minister of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, confirmed, in May 2025, that inmates of the Matia detention centre, including Rohingyas and alleged Bangladeshi nationals, were “pushed back” into Bangladesh.

The Mumbai-based human rights organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), on 31 May, 2025, submitted a memorandum to the Supreme Court alleging that, between 23 May and 31 May, at least 300 individuals—mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims—were detained, without arrest memo or warrant—and approximately 145 have now “disappeared” under highly suspicious and unlawful circumstances.

No Documents Enough

The tribunal declared Khatun a “foreigner/illegal migrant” who had “entered Assam on or after the 25th March 1971”—the cut-off date for citizenship for migrants in Assam—because she couldn’t establish a linkage to family members, according to the FT order that Article 14 has accessed.

Khatun had submitted documents to prove her citizenship, including voter lists from 1966, 1970 and 1985, which included the names of her great-grandmother, Ful Khatun; grandmother, Malatan Nessa; and father, Moinuddin, respectively. She also produced land records before the tribunal member under her name and the voter ID of her brother, Rupsan Ali. 

Article 14 has seen these documents.

However, according to her lawyer, Safiqul Islam, this was insufficient for the tribunal member to declare her an Indian national.

In at least seven cases, tribunal documents and High Court orders showed that the tribunal member declared them foreigners, despite them having submitted documents such as certificates of residence issued by the respective gaonburah (village headman), land deeds, and witnesses from their family members.

Like Khatun, Kitab Ali also submitted electoral rolls of 1970 and 1985, which contain the name of his father, Innos Ali, and the names of the seven voters of his family, including Kitab Ali himself. 

In addition, Kitab Ali also submitted a certificate of residence from the gaonburha of his village, Lachanga, in Barpeta. 

Gulzar Hussain, Kitab Ali’s son, told Article 14 that all his family members are Indians. Kitab Ali was declared a foreigner in May 2022 by a tribunal in Barpeta.

Minor Discrepancies 

We have also found three other cases where the tribunals declared the individual an “illegal migrant” over minor discrepancies in dates or statements by their family members. 

Take the case of 60-year-old Mokhbul Hussain, one among the 63 to be deported.

Hussain was declared a foreigner by a Barpeta tribunal in 2018 because of inconsistencies in the timeline of when he moved from Barpeta’s Ata gaon to Kuthurijahar, some 40 km west in Baksa district. 

Hussain told the tribunal that he moved to Kuthurijhar 35 years ago, after his marriage, “but during cross examination, his brother Sadek Ali told the tribunal that he moved to Kuthurijhar 40 years ago,” Mohar Ali, Hussain’s eldest brother, said. 

According to professor Mohsin Alam Bhat, who teaches law at Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom, and is the co-founder of Assam-based Parichay, a legal aid clinic assisting stateless people, these tribunals either “demand too many documents or find loopholes such as minor discrepancies in documents and oral evidence to declare such individuals as foreigners”.

Legal experts, human rights groups and lawyers have previously criticised the operation of these tribunals, likening them to Kangaroo courts, and often aided by constitutional courts (here, here and here). 

“The FTs function arbitrarily,” Bhat said, “and within an institutional expectation to be deeply suspicious of these individuals.”

An Assam-based advocate who represents people at Foreigners’ Tribunals told Article 14 that the tribunal members, appointed by Assam government’s home and political department, purposely declare people as foreigners.

“These [tribunal] members have to maintain a certain strike rate of declaring people as foreigners,” the advocate said, requesting anonymity. “The more people they declare foreigners, the longer they last as members.”

Each of Assam’s 100 FTs consists of a single member who is either a judge, advocate, or a civil servant with judicial experience.

Previously, Article 14 reported on allegations that 19 tribunal members' services were terminated in 2017 for declaring less than 10% of litigants as foreigners.

Meanwhile, on 20 February 2025, Monowara Khatun was released from the detention camp on conditional bail in line with the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling ordering the release of people who have been in detention for more than two years in detention centers in Assam.

Weaponising The Law

Asha Banu told the FT that Ainal Mandal, a resident of Barpeta’s Domani village, was her cousin, and that she was herself declared an Indian by a tribunal in the district in 2016.

The tribunal did not accept her testimony. “Coming to the testimony of [Asha Banu], it cannot be said that the same is trustworthy and reliable," the tribunal member said, in the order accessed by Article 14. 

The tribunal member said that Mandal, in the evidence submitted on on 12 August 2017, did not mention that Asha Banu was declared an Indian on 8 August 2016.

In their order in 2019, the tribunal member stated that Mandal was a “foreigner” who had “miserably failed to discharge his burden of proof” under section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946. 

Mandal was released on conditional bail from the transit camp on 22 May 2025, and is one of the 63 DFNs facing deportation. 

The Act came into effect in Assam after the Supreme Court, in 2005, struck down the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 1983—which required the state to provide proof for suspecting a person's citizenship—following the judgement in Sarbananda Sonowal vs. Union of India & Anr.

The court ruled that the Act was “unconstitutional” and the “main barrier” in the identification and deportation of illegal immigrants

In the cases of 10 people from the 63 DFNs, FT members cited this section of the Act, and rejected oral testimonies from the family members while declaring individuals as foreigners.

This is despite progressive Gauhati High Court judgements emphasising the need to appreciate oral evidence (here and here).

“While searching for the relevancy, the tribunal is bound to consider the oral evidence also along with the documentary one, as not all facts can be proved only by documentary evidence,” said a division Gauhati High Court bench in June 2020.

Bhat, the law professor, added that while the tribunals are able to place the burden of proof on the individual within their legal framework, the burden of proof cannot be solely based on documentary evidence.

“Nowhere is it written that the burden of proof can only be satisfied with documentary evidence,” he said. “Oral testimonies are enough to satisfy the burden of proof.”

D For Doubtful

Ajabha Khatun, a 56-year-old mother of six, one of the 63 DFNs facing deportation, is currently in detention at the Matia camp.

She was declared a foreigner by a tribunal in 2019 after legal proceedings over her citizenship status, following a 1998 case under the now-defunct Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983.

Trouble over her citizenship first began when she was marked as a Doubtful (D) voter along with over 313,000 people in the state in 1997. This was driven by an exercise by the election commission of India after anxiety in the state among the Assamese nationalists that “the electoral rolls were infested with the names of foreigners/illegal migrants”. 

The process of marking an individual as a D-voter involves a local verification officer (LVO) who submits a report—a form with columns for the officer to fill out with information about a person to verify the veracity of their citizenship—to the district's election commissioner.

In Ajabha Khatun’s case, the report submitted by the LVO marking her a D-voter begs questions, according to her family members. 

“The entire process of making my sister a D-voter was mired in mystery,” Sadik Ali, her cousin from Barpeta’s Bheraldi, told Article 14, over the phone. “The LVO marked her a D-voter for the sake of marking her a D-voter.”

We accessed the LVO’s report in Ajabha Khatun’s case and found that the LVO did not specify in the report whether she migrated into Assam, the country of migration and the date of migration.

Similar anomalies are also common in at least three other LVO reports from 1997 that this reporter analysed among the 63 DFNs, with lawyers and activists telling us that in most of these cases the pattern of the LVO not mentioning where people they allege to be foreigners came from exists.

“These were a part of a shoddy investigation by the LVOs to strip citizenship from the Bengali-speaking people in Assam,” said Faruk Khan, a D-voter activist and the founder of D-voter Mancha, a Barpeta-based organisation that advocates for the rights of D-voters. “In most of such reports, the LVO does not produce any proof for marking such individuals as D-voters.”

Such arbitrariness in marking of D-voters also came to light in the Barpeta district in 2019 through a reply under the Right to Information Act, 2005, in response to an application filed by 33 residents of the district who had been labeled D-voters, which showed that the district election authority had no official records against individuals who were marked D-voters in 1997.

Declared Foreigners Without Being Heard

S* and K* spent eight and nine years, respectively, in detention centres, including two at the Matia transit camp, after they were taken into custody by border police in eastern Assam’s Moran in 2016, while working in the industrial town as ragpickers.

They were released from the transit camp in late 2024 on conditional bail, following the 2021 Supreme Court judgement ordering the release of detainees who had spent over two years in detention centers. 

The two brothers, from a Bengali-speaking Muslim community, were previously declared foreigners—S* in May 2008 and K*, one of the 63 DFNs awaiting deportation to Bangladesh, in February 2014—in two separate ex-parte orders by two tribunals in eastern Assam.

Ex-parte orders are one-sided orders passed by the tribunal members without hearing the litigants involved. Both tribunals involving S* and K* took place without their knowledge and attendance.

DNFs are often poor and live in small and remote riverine villages and may travel to other locations for work. While this makes it harder for authorities to serve notice for tribunal hearings, a Gauhati High Court advocate told Article 14 that the authorities do not follow the procedure of sending a notice under the Foreigners (Tribunal), 1964. 

“Part 3 of this Act clearly lays out that a notice should be served to the person’s last resided address, and if not available, in the current address,” the advocate said on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal. “In most cases, they just stick a notice on somebody else’s residence.” 

The violation in the process of serving such notices also came to light when authorities pasted tribunal notices on electricity poles in Assam’s Bongaigaon in 2021. 

According to the union ministry of home affairs, between 1985 and 28 February, 2019, nearly 64,000 people were declared foreigners through ex-parte proceedings in Assam.

“The worst thing is,” K*, 30, said, “we only understood we were declared foreigners years ago, after we were sent to jail. Our lives were destroyed in those nine years.”

Article 14 found that tribunals had passed ex-parte orders without hearing the other party in at least eight of the 63 cases. 

A Guwahati-based advocate representing some of the 63 DFNs in the Gauhati High Court said ex-parte rulings where the accused individual is absent from the hearings violate the principle of natural justice. 

“In most of these cases, notices are not served properly, leading to individuals not appearing before the tribunals,” he said, requesting anonymity. 

The advocate added that the Gauhati High Court’s divisional bench judgment in Moslem Mandal And Ors v. Union of India And Ors in 2010 had ruled that tribunals cannot declare a person a foreigner based on non-response to notices.

The full bench judgment in the same case, however, overturned the ruling in 2013 after the state government filed a review of the 2010 order. 

‘Making of Moymonshinga’

Two of the DFNs accused the border police of manufacturing Bangladeshi addresses to support the case for deportation.

The police claimed that Jafar Ali and Sirajul Haque, both among the 63, are from Mymensingh, a district in northeastern Bangladesh, yet their names feature, as another 6 of the DFNs do, on the 2019 NRC final draft as Indian citizens.

The NRC, a state-wide citizenship screening drive aimed to dispel anxieties around illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. 

Four days after casting his vote in the general election in May 2024, Ali was arrested by the border police from his village, Jogighopa, a town in northern Assam’s Bongaigaon district. 

A tribunal had declared him a foreigner in September 2016.

The tribunal, while passing the order against his citizenship, relied on a report by the border police that he migrated to Assam after 1971 from Mymensingh, a district in northeastern Bangladesh.

In 52-year-old Haque’s case as well, the border police, in their 2004 investigation report, claimed that Haque himself made a written statement that he migrated to Assam from Mymensingh. Haque is currently detained at the transit camp and is facing deportation. 

Article 14 has seen a copy of this confessional report. 

We reached out to the office of Devojyoti Mukherjee, the inspector general of police (Border), Assam, via calls on 2 June and 7 June. We also sent him an email on 20 May asking whether the Border police had fabricated Bangladeshi addresses for suspected foreigners. 

We have not received a response. We will update this story if we do.

The riparian Mymensingh, situated on the old Brahmaputra River, borders Assam and Meghalaya, and is 238 and 290 km upstream of the transboundary river from Jogigopha and Haque’s village, Haldia gaon, respectively. 

Ali, now out of the transit camp on conditional bail and facing deportation along with the 63, denies the claim by the border police. 

“Mymensingh?” Ali asked, expressing shock. “Where is this? I have never heard of a place like this in my life.”

Haque’s family also dismissed that he ever made a confessional statement.

“The border police did not even come to our house, nor was he ever summoned to the police station,” Hazrat Ali, Haque’s brother, said. “Eita ki doroner nyay (What kind of justice is this)? All our ancestors died and lived here.”

Mymensingh, which saw a mass migration of Muslim peasants into Assam during the colonial period, is a common address that the border police write against the name of Bengal-origin Muslims.

“The border police make these people Moymonshinga(s)—the demonym for people from Mymensingh—from their desks,” said Ashim Mubarak, an advocate associated with Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), a human rights movement working for stateless people in Assam. “This is a result of no investigation by the border police and their biases against Bengali Muslims.”

A previous investigation into 818 tribunal orders by a Bengaluru-based think-tank, DAKSH, in 2020, revealed that in 218 cases, border police stated in their report that the person was from Mymensingh, an overwhelming number of these are Bengali-speaking Muslims. 

As recently as July 2024, the Supreme Court too pulled up the arbitrary functioning of the border police in a judgment wherein the citizenship of a Bengali-Muslim man was restored after 12 years. The Border police had claimed that he migrated to Assam from Mymensingh. 

Deportation To Bangladesh 

Anowara Khatun, 52, was declared a foreigner by a tribunal in December 2019, four months after her name appeared in the final NRC list.

Released from the transit camp after 14 months, following a Supreme Court order on 21 March, 2025, Khatun now reports to a local police station in Baksa district every Wednesday as part of her bail conditions.

“She is just counting days before she is picked up again by police sent to Bangladesh,” said her son, Anowar Hussain, a dry fish seller. “This is despite my mother’s name on the NRC.” 

According to a government affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, accessed by Article 14, these “exclusively Bangladeshi Nationals,” including Anowara Khatun, could not be deported to Bangladesh because their “foreign addresses [were] not found” in Bangladesh. 

However, the state government told the Supreme Court on 21 March this year that the nationality status verification (NSV) of these individuals was sent to the ministry of external affairs (MEA) on 14 February, 2025.

NSV is a diplomatic process in which the state government shares information about a suspected foreign citizen with the MEA, which then verifies their citizenship status with their home country's high commission, clearing the ground for deportation.

On 18 May, we reached out, via email, to Ajay Tiwari, additional chief secretary to the government of Assam and Vikram Misri, foreign secretary for the MEA to check the status of the NSVs. No response has been received yet. We will update this story if they respond.

We also wrote to the assistant high commission of Bangladesh, Guwahati, on 20 May to check if Bangladesh would confirm the 63 DFNs as Bangladeshi nationals. A response from them is awaited. 

“If we were thrown into Bangladesh, we would be put in another detention center,” said K*, who now reports to a police station in Moran after conditional bail.

His nationality verification status is still pending, having been first sent to the Bangladeshi High Commission in 2019.

“Would it not be better that they throw us into Matia (Transit Camp) again?” he said. “Even though it’s worse than hell, Matia is in India, my country.”

*Name changed on request

(Arshad Ahmed is an independent journalist based in Assam, writing on human rights, politics and marginalised communities.)

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