Guwahati, Nov 1: The Gauhati High Court has directed the Assam government to conduct a departmental review and take suitable measures against foreigner’s tribunals declaring applicants as citizens of India or foreigners without proper analysis of the materials on record or assigning any reasons for such declarations.
The court’s directive came while hearing a writ petition filed against the opinion of a foreigner’s tribunal in Bongaigaon, declaring an individual a foreigner based on a discrepancy in the name of his father.
Finding the tribunal’s rejection of the petitioner’s citizenship application unsubstantiated, the court opined that a minor discrepancy in the name of the person should not be a ground for concluding individuals as different persons. Hence, it remanded the matter to the tribunal to re-examine the documents and pass a reasoned order.
Observing trends of declarations by the tribunals based on recording material without analysis or reasoning, a division bench of the high court observed: “Such procedure adopted would have to be deprecated. The tribunals are entrusted upon the jurisdiction to adjudicate a reference made and decide upon the materials produced before it by giving reasons as to whether the materials indicated the person to be a foreigner or a citizen. Any conclusion arrived dehors any decision or adjudication cannot be an acceptable conclusion and it has to be construed that the tribunals had not discharged the jurisdiction vested upon it under the law.”
The court remarked that if proceedees had been declared foreigners without stating any reasoning or analysis of the materials produced, then there would be a possibility that the same procedure being used to declare a proceedee to be a citizen, may have led to many proceedees who may be foreigners or illegal migrants being wrongly declared to be citizens by the tribunals.
“In some of the matters, it is noticed that there is no proper recording as to what material has been relied upon which would be a basis for the conclusion arrived. Such procedure adopted would have a far more serious consequence,” the court observed.
Accordingly, the court directed the secretary, home department, to conduct a departmental review of all such references that had been answered by the tribunals declaring the proceedees to be citizens.
The court stated that the home department would be free to take appropriate measures, as per law, wherever it noticed that any such conclusion or declaration of proceedings by a foreigner’s tribunal had been made without any analysis of the materials or without providing for any reason thereof.
