Supreme Court of India (File Photo)
New Delhi: Supreme Court quashed Foreigners Tribunal‘s proceedings against Assam man saying that minor discrepancies in documents not sufficient to doubt citizenship claim.
The Supreme Court has quashed an order of Foreigners Tribunal that had declared an Assam resident as foreigner.
Declaring him as an Indian citizen, the SC held that the minor discrepancies in the material produced by him were not sufficient enough for there to be doubt and disbelief about his citizenship claim.
The SC observed that, “The discrepancy(ies) in the material produced by the appellant can be termed minor. The same were not sufficient to lead the Tribunal to doubt and disbelieve the appellant and the version put forth by him. Thus, we are not inclined to remand the matter to the Tribunal for another round of consideration. Putting an authoritative quietus to the issue, the appellant is declared an Indian citizen and not a foreigner.”
The case involved Md. Rahim Ali, a resident of Nalbari district in Assam, who was accused of being an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh who entered India after March 25, 1971 – the cut-off date for detecting foreigners in Assam according to the Assam Accord. In 2012, a Foreigners Tribunal in Nalbari declared Ali a foreigner in an ex-parte order. The Gauhati High Court upheld this decision in 2015. Subsequently, Ali approached the Supreme Court to challenge his classification as a foreigner.
