The Supreme Court has finally given its verdict on a petition filed 12 years ago, and upheld the validity of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act for Assam. The verdict was given by majority view, with four judges of the division bench including chief justice Chandrachud taking a joint stand and a fifth judge giving a different view. The verdict, appreciably, “balances the interests of migrants and the desire of the natives,” for preservation of their cultural mores and citizenship rights. Section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955 had been added to the original act in pursuance of the 1985 Assam Accord the central government of Rajiv Gandhi had signed with representatives of the Assam Movement led mainly by student leaders, who later went on to run the state government. The backdrop to the movement was the large-scale influx of Bangladeshis following the 1971 war and repression of the people there by the Pakistani Army. This mass influx too had a humanitarian angle. Section 6A ruled that those “who came to Assam on or after January 1, 1996 but before March 25, 1971 from Bangladesh at the time of the Citizenship Amendment Act 1985, and are resident in Assam”, can register themselves as citizens of India.
The petition filed in 2012 by the Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha and others, challenged section 6A by arguing that it discriminated against other Indian citizens by “permitting different cut-off dates for regularising illegal migrants entering Assam and the rest of the country.” While the present verdict asserts that “Section 6A balances the humanitarian need of migration with the economic effects of migration,” Justice JB Pardiwala’s dissenting view is that Section 6A is unconstitutional with a prospective effect. “The purpose of Section 6A was not achieved, that is, expedient detection of those who entered in the 1966-71 period, their deletion from the electoral rolls and conferment of de jure citizenship only on the expiry of 10 years.” He also stressed: “On suspicion that a person is a foreigner, the onus is on the person who came between 1966-1971 to prove that he is a citizen — and not for the government to prove it, as the section stipulated. The underlying object of creating two distinct categories of immigrants under Section 6A could have been achieved only if the exercise of detection of immigrants of the 1966-71 stream and their deletion from the electoral roll was conducted en- masse and in a time-bound manner. This was not done as intended.”
These points are well-taken, but the larger context cannot be ignored either. In the majority opinion, Justice Surya Kant rightly points out that Section 6A was introduced in the spirit of fraternity. “People cannot choose their neighbours. That is not the idea of fraternity.” The idea, the verdict stressed, is to live and let live. “People of different backgrounds should live in the spirit of inclusiveness and togetherness.”
