New Delhi: The Gauhati high court has set aside a two-year-old order of the Foreigners Tribunal declaring a man as a foreigner for failing to establish connection with all relatives in the pre-1971 voters’ lists, LiveLaw has reported.
To enter the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC), a person has to trace back her lineage to those who were residing in India before the cut-off date of March 24, 1971. About 19.06 lakh of some 3.3 crore applicants were excluded from the list for lack of documents establishing their citizenship, when the NRC was updated last in August 2019.
In this particular case, the Foreigners Tribunal of western Assam’s Barpeta had held one Haider Ali as a foreigner on January 30, 2019 as he had failed to establish links with five relatives other than his grandfather Nadu Miya and grandmother Aymona whose names appeared in the voters’ list of 1970.
Hearing Ali’s plea, high court judge Justice N. Kotiswar Singh has observed that although it would have strengthened Ali’s case to explain his family tree in detail, however, he added that it cannot be the grounds for declaring him a foreigner.
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“Of course, if the petitioner had disclosed in more detail the family tree, it would rather strengthen his claim, but failure to disclose the names of all the members of the family cannot weaken his case and render his evidence unreliable, nor reduce the credibility of his evidence, when there are other corroborating evidence,” Justice Singh quoted as saying by LiveLaw.in.
The high court has held that Ali, a resident of Kawaimari Block 12 village, had already established through documents that he is the son of Harmuz Ali, and that his grandmother was Nadu Miya, who both are “admittedly Indians”.
It has added that as Ali’s father and grandfather’s Indian citizenship had already been “duly proved by aforesaid voters’ list of 1970 and 1965, the genuineness of which was not questioned by the state”.
Therefore, the court said that “non-explanation of the relationship of the petitioner with other persons mentioned in the voters’ list of 1970 cannot be a ground for disbelieving the correctness of the entry of names of the grandparents in the voters’ list, when the correctness of the entry of the names of the petitioner’s father and grandfather was not questioned”.
According to the Assam Accord, which was signed in 1985, those who came into Assam on or after March 25, 1971 shall continue to be detected and deported, and it is the cut-off date for entry in the updating NRC in the state.