A Muslim woman who had been expelled from India in December moved the Supreme Court on Monday challenging a Gauhati High Court ruling that refused to hear her plea against a tribunal order that declared her a foreigner.

In September 2019, the foreigners’ tribunal had declared Aheda Khatun a foreigner for failing to establish a connection between her Indian parents and grandparents.

The tribunal had not considered documents such as four consecutive voter lists that showed her parents as electors, her school certificate, the permanent residency certificate issued by the village chief and a registered gift deed of a land parcel given to her by her father.

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.

She had been held in a detention camp till the High Court in August dismissed her plea, refusing to interfere in her matter.

The court had cited Khatun’s failure to explain the six-year delay in challenging the tribunal’s order. However, it had not commented on the merits of her case.

On December 17, Khatun was among the 15 declared foreigners that the Assam government had ordered to leave the country under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act. The 44-year-old is still in Bangladesh.

The Act grants power to district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the foreigners tribunals.

Khatun, in her petition before the Supreme Court, argued that the High Court’s decision violated her personal liberty. She also challenged the tribunal’s order.

On Monday, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi issued a notice to the Assam government, asking the state to verify the genuineness of the documents being relied on by the family to prove their citizenship.

The authorities have been asked to respond by March 16.

Khatun’s petition in the Supreme Court says that she was born in the state’s Nagaon district in July 1981 and that the name of her parents had appeared continuously in the voter lists of 1965, 1970, 1985 and 1997. Her father had inherited ancestral land in 1987, a part of which he gifted to Khatun in 2010.

The proceedings against Khatun had begun with a police reference allegedly made in 1998 and culminated with the tribunal’s order in 2019, she said in her petition. The reference was based on a report by the electoral registration officer, without a notice being served to Khatun, she alleged.

SC issues notice in another case

On January 8, the Supreme Court also issued a notice to the Union government on a petition filed by another woman challenging a 2020 Gauhati High Court ruling that upheld the 2015 order by the foreigners' tribunal in Kokrajhar district. The tribunal had declared her a foreigner in an ex-parte order.

The woman had been forced into Bangladesh two to three weeks ago, her lawyer told Scroll.

In its 2020 ruling, the High Court said that the woman had appeared before the tribunal in 2009 and her statement had been recorded in 2011. However, the court noted, the woman had stopped appearing before the tribunal and refused to accept a notice on the grounds that her husband’s name was wrongly shown in it.

The High Court said the tribunal had correctly concluded that the name had been accurately shown and that the woman had “deliberately avoided” the proceedings. The tribunal passed its order declaring her a foreigner in December 2015.

The High Court had also noted that the woman had said that her home had been burnt down during a riot in 2012.

The riots in Kokrajhar in 2012 had broken out between Bodos and Bengali-origin Muslims. They had left about 100 dead and rendered four lakh homeless.

The High Court quoted the woman as saying that the riot forced her to live in a relief camp in Dhubri, making it difficult for her to contact her lawyer.

She was arrested in 2019 and held at the Kokrajhar detention camp.

Since April, several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.