Guwahati: The Gauhati High Court on Tuesday, June 30, declared a 38-year-old man in Assam a foreigner despite him furnishing 15 separate documents to prove his Indian citizenship.
Citing the burden of proof under Section 9 of the Foreign Act, 1946, and inconsistencies in the identification documents, a division bench comprising Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Shamima Jahan dismissed the writ petition.
The petitioner, Aminul Hoque, a daily-wage labourer, was living in a rented place near Guwahati and had given an oral testimony, along with the established paper trail. The 15 documents included a 2017 school certificate, a copy of the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC), which listed his father and grandparents, several voter lists, a PAN (Permanent Account Number) card and an Elector’s Photo Identity Card (EPIC).
“Though the petitioner has exhibited 15 documents as exhibits, the same does not help the petitioner to establish that he has been able to discharge his burden as required under Section 9… to prove that he is not a foreigner but an Indian citizen,” said the division bench.
The Hoque’s own father had appeared in the court to identify him as his son. However, the court ruled that oral evidence alone, without documentary evidence, “which is admissible and relevant,” was not sufficient to show that the two were associated.
Inconsistencies flagged in the 15 documents
A foreigners’ tribunal in Assam’s Kamrup in February 2019 had declared Hoque as a foreigner. He had approached the High Court, alleging that the tribunal had made the decision “without fair or proper inquiry.” Hoque said in his petition that poverty had pushed him to work as a daily-wage labourer in Guwahati.
The High Court observed that the petitioner’s grandfather had four different names in the documents. The names of the grandfather, father and the petitioner are inconsistently spread across the voter lists of three villages, Dobakura, Ghugudoba and Hashdoba, where Hoque’s family had lived over the last six decades, the bench said.
The court said the defence “structured around” the submitted voter lists to address the missing links. The petitioner pleaded without appropriate supporting documents showing the family moved between the villages. “To match with the names in the voter lists, it has been pleaded that there was a mistake in the recording of names in the voter lists.”
It dismissed the document proving the purchase of land, at best, as evidence of sale, which cannot be proof that the petitioner had links with the purchaser. On PAN cards and voter IDs, the court said “it is well settled” that those documents cannot serve as proof of citizenship without supporting income tax records. The school certificate was rejected because the person who issued it had not appeared before the court to depose and support it.
“… the petitioner has not been able to establish that the learned Tribunal had committed any patent error in appreciating the pleadings and evidence on record, or that it considered extraneous materials or that the decision was based on ignorance of law or in disregard of the provisions of law,” the bench noted.
The judgment comes days after the Ministry of External Affairs’ statement that a passport cannot act as proof of Indian citizenship had triggered a heated debate.
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