The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a petition challenging the Assam government “pushing” back to Bangladesh persons who have been declared foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals in the state, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and SC Sharma was hearing a petition filed by the All BTC Minority Students Union, which claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state was arbitrarily pushing Indian citizens to Bangladesh without following due process under the guise of deporting undocumented migrants.

“Why are you not going to the Gauhati High Court?” PTI quoted the bench as asking advocate Sanjay Hegde, who appeared for the All BTC Minority Students Union. In response, Hegde said that the petition was based on an order passed by the top court earlier.

The advocate also said that the union would withdraw the petition and take recourse before the High Court. The Supreme Court then allowed him to withdraw the petition.

The petition came against the backdrop of a surge in detentions of declared foreigners in Assam since May 23. Families say they have no information on their relatives’ whereabouts. Some of them have identified their missing relatives in videos from Bangladesh, alleging they were forcibly sent across the border.

Scroll had earlier reported that a former teacher from Morigaon district, Khairul Islam, whose citizenship case was still being heard in the Supreme Court, had been picked up from the Matia detention centre and forced out along the Bangladesh border near Assam’s South Salmara district in the early hours of May 27.

In a video recorded by journalist Mostafuzur Tara from Bangladesh’s Rangpur division, Khairul Islam alleged that he was among 14 persons “pushed” into Bangladesh by India’s Border Security Force on the morning of May 27.

Islam and the others were reported to be in no man’s land, between the two countries.

Three days later, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma admitted to “pushing” back persons who were declared foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals to Bangladesh. Stating that the process to push back foreigners would continue, Sarma claimed that the action was being taken as per the directives issued by the Supreme Court in February.

On February 4, the Supreme Court directed the state government to start the process of deporting foreign nationals being held in the state’s detention centres immediately.

It had said that foreign nationals can be deported even without an address. “You cannot continue to detain them indefinitely...Once they are held to be foreigners, they should be deported immediately.”

Foreigners Tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. Only those living in the state before March 25, 1971, or their descendants, qualify as Indian citizens in Assam, as per the Assam Accord.

However, these tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

In its petition, the All BTC Minority Students Union said that after the February 4 order, the Assam government had “reportedly launched a sweeping and indiscriminate drive to detain and deport individuals suspected to be foreigners, even in the absence of Foreigners Tribunal declarations, nationality verification, or exhaustion of legal remedies”, PTI reported.

Referring to several news reports about persons being “pushed” into Bangladesh, the petition said that these instances reflected a “growing pattern of deportations conducted by the Assam Police and administrative machinery through informal ‘push back’ mechanisms, without any judicial oversight or adherence to the safeguards envisaged by the Constitution of India or this court”.

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