Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Wednesday claimed that alleged “illegal immigrants” can be “pushed back” to Bangladesh even if their names are in the National Register of Citizens.

“If we are reasonably sure they are an illegal immigrant, we will push them back immediately,” the chief minister added.

Assam published a National Register of Citizens in August 2019 with the aim of separating Indian citizens from undocumented immigrants living in the state. Residents had to prove that they or their ancestors had entered Assam before midnight on March 24, 1971, in order for them to be included in the list.

More than 19 lakh persons, or 5.77% of the applicants, were left out of the final list.

The NRC has not been notified by the Union government following objections by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government and Assamese nationalist groups who have demanded reverification.

In a social media post, Sarma said that the state had pushed back 19 “illegal immigrants” on Tuesday and will push back nine more on Wednesday.

“Many names were manipulatively and cleverly included in the NRC [National Register for Citizens],” he said. “The way the NRC process was conducted has raised serious doubts and concerns.”

The chief minister added that the presence of a name in the register alone was not “enough to determine that someone is not an illegal immigrant”.

This statement came four days after Sarma claimed that the persons declared foreigners were being “pushed back” to Bangladesh under a legal framework.

On June 7, the chief minister said that the Supreme Court, while hearing the challenges to Section 6A of the 1955 Citizenship Act, had said that “there is no legal requirement for the Assam government to always approach the judiciary in order to identify foreigners”.

“There exists an old law called the ‘Immigrants Expulsion Order’,” Sarma said. “The Supreme Court has stated that this law is still in force. According to this law, the DC [district collector] has the authority to issue an order and permit immediate pushback.”

In October, the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutional validity of Section 6A of the 1955 Citizenship Act.

Section 6A was introduced as a special provision under the Act when the Assam Accord was signed between the Union government and leaders of the Assam Movement in 1985. It allows foreigners who came to Assam between January 1, 1966, and March 25, 1971, to seek Indian citizenship.

Indigenous groups in Assam have alleged that this provision in the Act had legalised infiltration by migrants from Bangladesh.

On Monday, Sarma said that the Assam government had “pushed back” 303 “foreigners” and will continue to do so under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

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The deportations

On May 31, the chief minister confirmed that Assam was “pushing back” to Bangladesh persons who have been declared foreigners by the state’s Foreigners Tribunals.

Foreigners Tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. However, the 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.

Sarma’s May 31 statement had come against the backdrop of an increase 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.

Sarma had claimed that the process of pushing back foreigners was being taken as per the directives issued by the Supreme Court in February.

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

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