Guwahati, Jan 19: The Gauhati high court has overturned an order that declared a 40-year-old resident Nagaon in Assam an undocumented immigrant five years back, saying the tribunal that issued it did so without taking into account material on record.
A division bench of justices Achintya Malla Bujor Barua and Arun Dev Choudhury on Tuesday cited the material and stated Md Jamir Ali has wrongly declared a foreigner, who entered Assam after March 24, 1971, the cut-off for detecting undocumented immigrants.
A final National Register of Citizens (NRC) excluded 1.9 million of the 33 million applicants in August 2019 after a decades-long movement against undocumented immigrants and stoked fears of loss of citizenship and long periods of detention.
The NRC was first published in Assam in 1951. It was updated in 2019 to detect and delete undocumented immigrants from citizenship rolls.
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Ali moved to the high court after he was declared an undocumented immigrant in June 2018. A case was registered against him in this regard in 2009.
The court said the petitioner established his link with Abbas Ali as his father, whose name appeared in the voters’ list of 1965. “The materials through which the link was established were not taken note of by the Tribunal,” the court said.
Haliman Nessa, 80, the petitioner’s mother, told the court she was expecting Md Jamir Ali when her husband passed away. “My husband was [a] permanent resident of village Goroimari. He died before Jamir’s birth. My husband’s name along with my name appeared on the voter list of 1965. My entire family including my children are Indians.”
The family produced supporting documents to establish their claims.
