In 2013, a Foreigners Tribunal (FT) in Dibrugarh, Assam, issued a notice to Pinki Das, a woman in the final stages of pregnancy. Six months later, without her presence or defence, she was declared a foreigner through an ex parte order.
Pinki had missed a hearing because she gave birth to a baby boy in March. When she approached the Gauhati High Court, arguing that childbirth justified her absence, Justice A K Goswami dismissed her plea with chilling brevity: “We are not inclined to take a view that for giving birth to a child, she was unable to take part in the proceedings.”
Pinki’s story is not unusual. According to the latest available Lok Sabha data provided by the union ministry of home affairs, 63,959 people—more than 54% of those declared foreigners over 30 years, between 1985 and 2019—were declared so ex parte.
Such proceedings, which deny individuals the chance to present a defence, require no evidence from the State. Citizenship is stripped by default. This is the first of a two-part series on a new report, Unmaking Citizens, which shows these are not isolated cases but symptoms of a larger, broken system.
Authored by Mohsin Alam Bhat (Queen Mary University of London), Arushi Gupta, and Shardul Gopujkar, the report is supported by Queen Mary University, the Parichay Legal Aid Clinic, and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Based on three years of fieldwork and legal analysis—including 1,193 Gauhati High Court writ petitions challenging FT orders between 2009 and 2019—it finds that ex parte rulings were involved in nearly 47% (556) of these cases.
The findings: people are not being declared foreigners because they lack proof of citizenship—but because they are unable to participate in a process designed to exclude them.
Why Do Ex Parte Declarations Happen?
The report’s analysis of high court orders shows why people often fail to appear before tribunals. In 24% of cases, petitioners said they never received notice. Many notices were improperly served—pasted on shopfronts, walls or electric poles—leaving respondents unaware of proceedings.
In 16% of cases, petitioners raised serious issues about legal representation: 68 said they were misled or abandoned by their lawyers; 21 had no legal representation at all.
Other cases cited illness, illiteracy, language barriers, floods, poverty, or the daily grind of wage labour as reasons for absence. Yet tribunals and courts routinely dismissed these hardships, showing little concern for natural justice.
The High Court’s Shrinking Standards
To overturn an ex parte order, petitioners must show “sufficient cause” for non-appearance—a flexible standard meant to allow for real-life complications.
The Gauhati High Court has gradually hollowed out this standard. Instead of asking if absence was reasonable in context, the Court now demands that it be caused by circumstances completely beyond control—an impossible bar for the poor, rural, or uneducated.
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Consider Abdul Hamid. In 1990, he hired a lawyer to represent him. Twenty-six years later, he discovered—while collecting rations—that he had been declared a foreigner in 2000. The Gauhati High Court ruled against him, saying he should have “followed up” with the lawyer.
Or take the case of Bhanu Biswas, who did follow up. Reassured repeatedly by his lawyer, he later discovered he had been declared a foreigner in 2003. His writ petition, filed in 2011, was summarily dismissed.
In both cases, the petitioners were punished not for negligence but for trusting their lawyers—judged by hypothetical steps they could have taken, no matter how unreasonable.
No Rules, No Consistency
The report finds a deeper problem: the absence of clear legal standards on how FTs should handle absence, adjournments, or requests for re-hearings. This leaves enormous discretion in the hands of tribunal members—and the Gauhati High Court has failed to set consistent or principled guidelines.
Even the Court’s unwritten standards vary. Abdul Hamid was faulted for not checking in with his lawyer; Bhanu Biswas was faulted despite doing so.
Writ petitions alleging legal misrepresentation are regularly dismissed on expanding grounds. In some cases, petitioners are expected to file written submissions or evidence themselves—effectively doing the lawyer’s job. It’s a no-win situation where every step is too little, too late.
Of 87 petitions citing illness, only 16 succeeded. In most of those cases, the Court invoked vague notions, such as “in the interest of justice”, without clarifying how the illness met the “sufficient cause” standard.
Contrast that with the 44 petitions rejected outright. People suffering from dysentery, lumbar pain, spondylosis, or diabetic neuropathy were told they should have either appeared or arranged for someone else to represent them.
Even in rare successes, the court’s logic is unclear.
In Balen Ray’s case, psychiatric records showed abnormal behaviour, prompting Justice Manojit Bhuyan to overturn the ex parte order in 2018. But, Justice Manojit Bhuyan offered no explanation as to how this met the court’s own stringent standard.
The key question—whether the illness prevented Ray from fulfilling his obligations—was never examined.
The result is not just legal inconsistency but a regime of unchecked judicial discretion that offers no predictability or protection.
High Stakes, Hollow Process
Being declared a foreigner has devastating consequences. It means loss of healthcare, education, voting rights, ration cards—and the risk of indefinite detention. It can lead to civil death or statelessness, violating both constitutional rights and international human rights law.
In such a system, the high court is the only remedy. There is no statutory appeal against an FT’s decision.
But instead of acting as a safeguard, the high court has hardened the exclusions—imposing narrow thresholds, refusing to contextualise hardship, and offering no clear doctrinal standards.
Unmaking Citizens shows that ex parte declarations are not bureaucratic glitches. They are the outcome of a legal system that condemns people without hearing them, manipulates standards beyond recognition, and replaces justice with a machinery of exclusion.
First of a two-part analysis.
(Mohsin Alam Bhat is a lecturer in law at the Queen Mary University of London and a member of the Article 14 Editorial Board. Arushi Gupta is a Masters of Law (LL.M.) candidate at Columbia Law School.)
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