Special Director General of Police (Border), RM Singh said, “There are two parts to these 93,000 declared foreigners. First are the ones who came between 1966 and 1971 – these are around 40,000 in numbers. The rest are of post 25th March 1971 - around 50,000.”
He said that the names of the 40,000 persons from pre-1971 will get deleted from the voters’ list for 10 years. They can apply for National Register of Citizen (NRC) thereafter. Explaining further, Singh said that these persons have to register their names in the voters’ list. According to Singh more than 50% of these pre-1971 “declared foreigners” have not registered their names. From the date of their registration, their names will not be included in the voters’ list for 10 years thereafter. On completion of the 10 years, they will be eligible to vote. Talking about the post-1971 declared foreigners, Singh said, “They will be apprehended and deported to Bangladesh. The figure is around 50,000.”
He said that to identify these 50,000 declared foreigners, there have been 500 task forces operating across Assam since the last three years.
The task forces are apprehending 20-25 such foreigners every month.
The task forces are facing problems in searching out such foreigners as most of them keep shifting their locations, said Singh. By bribing some people they get new documents and manage to hide their past identities.
There are also allegations against the border police of delayed referral of cases to the foreigners’ tribunal.
In one such case reported where the border police made a reference (filing a case against someone doubted to be a foreigner) in 1998, the case was forwarded to foreigners’ tribunal in 2016. The foreigners’ tribunal passed the order that the person is a foreigner in 2017 and the person filed a writ petition against the order before the Gauhati High Court in 2018.
So why does the border police take so long to refer a case to a foreigners’ tribunal?
Singh said that three years ago, there were only 36 foreigners’ tribunals (FT) in Assam and now there are 100. An FT is supposed to dispose a case within 60 days. Earlier, as there were lesser numbers of FTs, there were delays in registration and trials of cases, he claimed.
Singh however claimed that Border Police send cases to the FT within a month.
Regarding some instances where some cases were slightly delayed in being sent to the FT, he explained that those are mostly cases of ‘D’ (doubtful) voters.
He explained that in 1997, 2.30 lakh people were identified as D voters and the district administration asked the police to verify the same.
This process took some time and the cases were sent to FTs a bit late, Singh claimed. But the cases referred to by border police reach the FTs within one month, he said.