Held As ‘Bangladeshi', Assam Villager Returns As ‘Indian' After 3 Years

‘Discrepancy’ in age led a tribunal to doubt his citizenship

- Rahul Karmakar

Moments before he left the Goalpara Central Jail in western Assam on May 7, Rehat Ali had promised the jail superintendent he would not say anything bad about his "home" of more than three years.

The jail doubles as a detention centre — one of six in Assam — for people declared foreigners by a quasijudicial Foreigners' Tribunal (FT). The State has 100 such tribunals that adjudicate the Foreigners' Act of 1946 to decide the fate of people suspected to be Bangladeshi by the Assam Police's border wing, formed in 1962 to initially prevent infiltration of Pakistani nationals.

"I gave him my word," said Mr. Ali. "But it is better to be dead than live there like a laash [corpse]," he added.

Having dropped out of primary school almost 60 years ago, Mr. Ali had such a poor knowledge of numbers that he never noticed that his voter ID showed him to be a 55-year-old, which was at odds with the "66" that he orally submitted as his age to the tribunal in 2015. The "discrepancy" in age was a key reason that led the FT at the nearest town Hajo, about 35 km west of Guwahati, to doubt his citizenship.

He could also not recall the date when his father Muniruddin had shifted from Bagnapota, 20 km away in Nalbari district, because the village was facing erosion by the Brahmaputra. And his name was recorded variously as `Rehat Ali' and `Rehaja Ali' in different documents.