Editorial: Miscarriage of justice

The struggle of Rahim Ali’s family, branded as a foreigner, exposes the loopholes in the citizenship verification process

The poignant case of Rahim Ali, an Assam resident branded as a foreigner but was posthumously declared an Indian citizen after a 12- year long legal battle, is a classic instance of a grave miscarriage of justice and exposes the loopholes in the citizenship verification process. The legal struggle of Ali’s family finally ended with the Supreme Court declaring him an Indian citizen and pulling up the authorities for branding him as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh without material evidence. The apex court has rightly pointed out that Section 9 of the Foreigners Act does not empower officials to “pick any person at random and suspect them to be foreigners.” Unfortunately, Ali, who bore the stigma of being labelled as a foreigner by a tribunal in 2012, is not alive today to savour this moment of vindication from the highest court of the land. He died two-and-a-half years ago, after living with the constant fear that he would be uprooted from his home in Assam’s Kashimpur village. Ali’s story is both tragic and absurd in a Kafkaesque way. For his widow Hajeera Bibi, the final verdict from the court brings no relief as it comes too late in the day. Her family has gone through an excruciating ordeal at the hands of an opaque, merciless and labyrinthine bureaucratic process that puts the onus of proving their innocence on the vulnerable. Following his exclusion from the citizenship register, Ali approached the Gauhati High Court challenging a Foreigners Tribunal’s (FT) ex-parte order declaring him a foreigner.

Following the dismissal of his appeal, Ali moved the Supreme Court in 2017. While finally upholding his citizenship, the SC ruled that it should not be left to the arbitrary discretion of the authorities to initiate proceedings, which have life-altering and very serious consequences for the accused persons. Ali was not alone in having faced such an ordeal. According to official figures tabled in the Assam Assembly, over 100 FTs disposed of 3.37 lakh cases at the end of last year and 1.59 lakh people were declared foreigners. As many as 94,149 cases are still pending. One wonders how many of them are wrongly labelled as illegal immigrants based on minor discrepancies in the documents and subjective interpretation of the cases. The issue of illegal migrants bogged Assam since the 1960s with the figures varying widely from time to time. While it is important for any country to identify and deport illegal immigrants, the process should not give any scope for fear among minorities and rake up social tensions. The debate over immigration has become highly polarised in the country with the top BJP leadership using it as ammunition for election campaigns. The pan-India National Register of Citizens (NRC) rollout has been the saffron party’s pet project and an issue frequently raised during Parliament and Assembly elections.

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