A Foreigners’ Tribunal in central Assam’s Morigaon district observed last month that the process of identifying foreigners and doubtful voters had become “an industry” for “minting money.” The “unfair practices” involved, it noted, turned Indians into foreigners and foreigners into Indians on the basis of fake or duplicate documents.
Rejecting the citizenship plea by one Haren Mandal, alias Haren Biswas, of the district’s No. 2 Gunamara village, the Foreigners’ Tribunal 3, or FT3, in Morigaon town found it “alarming” that almost all citizenship certificates of registration exhibited before the tribunal turned out to be fake, forged or tampered with.
Modus operandi
A copy of the judgment of August 31, 2017 is available with The Hindu .
“This surfaced after examining a series of such citizenship certificates covering the districts of Nagaon, Morigaon, Barpeta, Kokrajhar, Kamrup (Metro) and Kamrup,” FT3’s member (judge) Gautam Soren observed. The modus operandi of faking such certificates, he said, went to the extent of making a duplicate format with the same serial number.
Mr. Soren cited the case of one Subal Das of Barpeta to drive home the point that the serial number printed on the original and fake certificates were the same, while their contents were different. In the original document, Subal Das was Subal Sanyashi.
The order mentions a Gauhati High Court observation of January 7, 2017, that proceedees (people being tried for determining citizenship) resorted to fake, tampered or forged documents to gain undue advantage and its advise to the tribunals to be “more diligent” in scrutinising such papers.
Published - September 19, 2018 09:18 pm IST
