On October 7, when Dulabjan Begum came out of a Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT) office in Assam’s Silchar town, her tears did not stop streaming down her cheeks.
“These are happy tears,” the 50-year-old told media who is a resident of Dayapur Part I, a village roughly a 40-minute drive from Silchar in the southernmost Assam’s Cachar district.
For Begum, the air she breathed that day in an otherwise kafkaesque atmosphere smelt of relief and freedom as the Foreigners’ Tribunal-3 in Silchar declared her Indian after 6 long years of struggle and agony.
The Tribunal member B.K Talukdar, while hearing her appeal observed, “Considering the facts and materials submitted and depositions in the earliest and the present detailed voters’ list of 1965, 1987 along with the new documents…voter lists are to be appreciated by me without any doubts.”
He added, “Given that my considered opinion is that the OP [Dulabjaan Begum] is a Citizen of India born out of Indian Citizens living on Indian soil.”
The judgement came six months after the Gauhati High Court asked the same Tribunal bench to review her case after she moved the High Court in 2018 against the tribunal’s order.
If Begum could establish a link between her maternal grandfather Majmil Ali’s name on the 1965 voter list as well as her father’s, Sirai Mia Laskar, from the 1985 voter list as father and son, and additionally if her name appears alongside Sirai Mia in the 1993 voters list, then the petitioner’s burden of proof may have been discharged, read a copy of the judgement accessed by Maktoob.
This was one of her countless visits to the same Tribunal since she was first served notice to appear before it in 2015 after it decided to act on a 1998 case against her under the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act.
The case was registered by the district Border police — a police unit unique to the state which files complaints and summons against doubtful voters and illegal foreigners — after it came to light that her name appeared as “Dulubi Bibi” instead of her real name in the electoral roll of Udharbond Constituency in 1997, a year when around 3,70,000 people were declared D-voters in Assam by the Election Commission and directed the Assam government to remove non-citizens from the electoral list.
Twenty years later in 2017, the same member of the Tribunal, B.K Talukdar, declared her a “foreigner”.
“From that year on, and since that judgment, I have only seen dark days,” Begum told Maktoob. “These six years took everything from me.”
Mahitosh Das, who represented Begum at the Tribunal told Maktoob that the verdict came in her favour after she was able to furnish the linkage documents.
‘Because of a name’
Begum was unaware of the developments unfolding regarding her citizenship in 1997 for as a new bride that year she couldn’t care for anything else other than her marriage which was in tatters that year.
Married to Baktar Ali then in Khaspur, a revenue village just a few kilometres from Dayapur Part I under the same constituency, she saw her marriage falling apart due to personal rifts.
“I only spent one and a half months at my in-laws before my divorce with Ali. I had no idea that my citizenship was being called into question that year.”
Asked how she came to be known as Dulubi Bibi on the electoral roll in 1997, Begum, who is illiterate, said, “I have no idea when my name became Dulubi.”
Das, the advocate, shed light on it. He told Maktoob that this was a result of people having colloquial nicknames in villages. People are called different names. Even her father’s name i.e Siraj Uddin Laskar is listed as something else on the voter list. Their names on paper are something but they are called different names, so there is no exception with Begum as well, Das said.
“So, I think, her nickname was included in the voter list,” he explained. “But I think, if the electoral officer and the Border Police properly verified the matter, she would not have suffered.”
Begum’s present husband Sahab Uddin, 55, who married her in 2015 just a few months before the FT first served the notice, also echoed Das’s criticism of the Border police not investigating properly before marking her as a Doubtful voter, better known as D-voter in Assam.
He states, “She told me no one came to her house and asked anybody in the village to verify whether she was an Indian National or a D-voter.”
He also blamed the Tribunal member B.K Talukdar for not doing a thorough investigation before declaring her a “foreigner’’.
“I even told Talukdar that she is Indian on multiple occasions, but he didn’t listen,” added Sahab Uddin.
“I also told him you cannot declare someone a foreigner because of a name.”
The functioning of the Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam, whose numbers only ramped up after the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in 2019 in the state that excluded over 19 lakh people from the final draft, has been under scrutiny for a very long time as critics point out instances of them arbitrarily declaring people “foreigners” and “D-voters” over trivial inconsistencies on their paperwork.
In many cases, they were also found biased against Bengali Muslims and Hindus, according to an investigation.
“This is how the Tribunals declare Indian citizens as ‘foreigners’,’’ said Aman Wadud, an advocate who represents people who are declared “foreigners” by the FTs in Gauhati High Court. Wadud also added, “I have not come across any cases where a person is Bangladeshi.” “They are arbitrary in their approach and strip citizenship of Indian Citizens on hypertechnical grounds.”
Two years 10 days a Bangladeshi
Soon after the Tribunal declared her a “foreigner” in 2017, it was on a Wednesday at noon when she received a call from the district Border Police to appear before them.
Little did she know that her 40-minute one-way drive to the station was going to take her more than two years to reach her home again.
“The then Border Superintendent of Police (SP) said, ‘We are detaining you for two days till your documents are submitted’, but I kept waiting as hours became days and days became months and months turned into years.”
“For two years and 10 days, I was kept in the detention camp.”
Dulabjan Begum
Even though she was released on interim bail in April 2020 after the Supreme Court ordered the release of those who were in detention centres in Assam for over two years to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, she still looks back sorely on her time in the dingy detention centre in Silchar.
It was when she lost her father who used to visit her in the camp regularly.
“Those two years took the best thing in my life,” Begum said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
She added, “I used to cry every single day waiting for something to happen, even my eyes used to hurt, but the worst thing is amar baba mara gesoin (My father died) while not seeing me free from the tag of a Bangladeshi.”
Close to 200 people remain lodged in six detention centres, including Silchar, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma informed the assembly last year.
Indian at the cost of what?
“Why did I have to suffer if I were an Indian? What did I get now that I am declared an Indian? Look at us now. We are on the roads,” Begum said, her words turning bitter.
Sahab Uddin, though happy after the Tribunal’s order, feels that the six years of legal battle to “prove her citizenship took a huge financial toll on the family.”
A truck driver by profession who is confined to his house due to illness, he said, “We squandered more than 2.6 lakh rupees — money he once set aside for their house — and now we are left with nothing.”
The mild-mannered Begum who used to work as a mid-day meal cook at a government school has her salary docked since she was sent to the detention center. She suffered a loss of 50,000 rupees during that tenure, she told us.
“All of the suffering for what?” she asked, as she showed the inside of her kitchen with little to no stocks of edibles.
“I pray that nobody else goes through this,” she continued.
Silchar-based activist Kamal Chakraborty who helped her move the Gauhati High Court after meeting her at the detention center laments the agonising condition of Begum’s family.
“Just imagine if the High Court hadn’t asked the Tribunal to review her case, what would have happened to them?”
For now, Begum pins their hope on compensations from the government to turn a new page.
“But does the government ever compensate the poor,” Begum questioned.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Arshad Ahmed is an independent Journalist based in Assam. He writes on human rights, state policy and the environment. He tweets @arshadreports
