Priyanka Singh
Published on: September 27, 2022 at 20:59 IST
The Supreme Court, on Monday refused to hear a plea which sought the Court’s involvement in the estoppel of alleged harassment of people belonging to religious and linguistic communities in Assam under the name of detection and deportation of alleged foreigners.
The petition sought direction to authorities to not delete names from the final draft of the NRC published on 31.08.2019 and to stop further identification of doubtful voters without verification.
The petition also prayed to finalize the draft NRC after providing opportunity to the person whose names are not present in the 2019 list to prefer appeal against the rejection of their application.
The other prayers were the amendment of the Foreigner Act, 1946 and the Foreigners (Tribunal) Orders, 1964 by insertion of certain safeguards, to review the judgment on the top court where it was declared Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 as being ultra vires and a check on the actions of the authorities since the plea claims that the order has encouraged the reckless allegations imposed by the authorities, referring cases without fair investigation and facilitating arbitrary adjudication by the Foreigners Tribunal.
The burden of proof to show beyond doubt their citizenship was shifted to the poor applicants on the basis of Foreigners Act in absence of the safety mechanisms laid down in the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983.
A bench of Justices DY Chandrachud and Hima Kohli asked Senior Counsel, Mr. Sanjay Hegde, for petitioner, to come back with more ‘structured’ reliefs in the petition.
The present petition is set out in a haphazard manner. It specifically in exercise of jurisdiction under Article 32 of the Constitution of India, it would not be possible to review an order of the Apex Court.
The petition submits a number of 19,06,657 applicants left out in 2019.
The petition states the difficulties in proving their lineage, and that, the harassments lead to alleged ethnic cleansing.
The same year as 2019, a supplementary list was published, pointing out the conclusion of the Assam Legislative Assembly elections in 2021, where the Chief Minister announced the review of 20% of the NRC list in the border areas and 10% in the rest of the areas.