‘Prove we are Bangladeshi’: Assam families protest Supreme Court’s deportation push

Abdul Majid still recalls the day 21 years ago when police officials came to their village in Assam’s Barpeta district.

The border police, a unit tasked with investigating suspected foreigners in Assam, had come to inform the family that Majid’s younger brother Sirajul Haque was a suspected “illegal migrant”.

“We told them that he is not Bangladeshi but they did not listen,” Majid, a 70-year-old peasant said. “The police did not even visit our home. They did not check any documents, voter lists or land documents.”

Haque’s case eventually went to a foreigners’ tribunal, quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam that rule on citizenship matters.

In September 2022, the tribunal passed an ex-parte opinion – an order passed in his absence – declaring that Haque was a foreigner.

But his family was not unduly worried. Only three years ago, all of them, including Sirajul Haque, had made it to the National Register of Citizens. The culmination of a demanding bureaucratic exercise carried out on the basis of citizenship documents dating back to March 24, 1971, the register was meant to be the final word on who was Indian in Assam.

Yet, on September 2, 2024, nearly two years after the tribunal order, Haque was held by the border police along with 27 others and sent to the Matia detention…

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