Guwahati: The Gauhati High Court upheld a Foreigner’s Tribunal order declaring a man from Assam a foreigner despite him producing 15 documents to claim citizenship.The court said it still collectively failed to stand the test of admissibility and establish continuity with the projected Indian ancestors.“…Though the petitioner had exhibited 15 (fifteen) documents as exhibits, the same does not appear to help the petitioner to establish that he has been able to discharge his burden as required under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946 to prove that he is not a foreigner but an Indian citizen,” a division bench comprising Justice Kalyan Rai Surana and Justice Shamima Jahan said in its order.Section 9 of the Foreigners Act places the burden of proving citizenship on the person whose nationality is under question.Underlining that merely producing a large number of documents was not enough to establish citizenship, the high court said it found no reason to interfere with the tribunal’s order, holding that the petitioner could not show that the tribunal had made any serious error in appreciating the evidence or had acted contrary to the law.The petitioner, Aminul Hoque, who was declared a foreigner by Foreigners Tribunal No. 4, Kamrup (M), in 2019, challenged the order in the High Court.Hoque, who was born in 1988, was working as a daily labourer in Guwahati and staying in a rented house at Borbori village under Azara police station.To establish his citizenship, the petitioner relied on 15 documents, including a computer-generated extract of the 1951 NRC showing the names of his father, grandparents, step-grandmother and other family members, certified electoral rolls from 1966 to 2017, a 1973 land sale deed in favour of his grandfather, his PAN card, a school certificate issued in 2017 and his Elector’s Photo Identity Card (EPIC).Rejecting the petitioner’s reliance on the computer-generated 1951 NRC extract, the bench said the submission was legally misplaced and went so far as to observe that it “exposes the ignorance” of the petitioner’s counsel regarding the legal procedure for proving electronic and computer-generated documents in a judicial and/or quasi-judicial proceeding.The court said it was not unduly concerned by minor variations in the names of petitioner’s father, who appeared under four different spellings in various records. However, it held that the petitioner failed to establish a continuous documentary link between himself, his father and grandfather across electoral rolls of three villages—Dobakura, Ghugudoba and Hashdoba.“It appears that to fill-up the gaps, the defence of the petitioner is structured around the exhibited voter’s lists…. To match with the names in the voter’s lists, it has been pleaded that there was mistake in recording of names in voter lists,” the bench noted.The court held that the petitioner failed to prove that he was related to his projected grandfather, Pasan Ali, whose name appeared in the 1966 and 1970 electoral rolls, and his projected father, Mahruddin Sheikh, whose name figured in the 1979 voter list. It also flagged glaring inconsistencies in the recorded ages of family members, particularly the petitioner’s mother, Faziron Nessa, whose age was shown as 25 in the 1979 voter list, 39 in the 1997 roll and again 25 in the 2005 electoral roll.The bench also upheld the tribunal’s rejection of a 1973 sale deed relied upon by the petitioner, saying it merely evidenced a land purchase and, in the absence of land records showing inheritance, partition or relinquishment of rights, failed to establish family linkage. It further ruled that neither the petitioner’s PAN card nor his EPIC could be treated as proof of citizenship, observing that the PAN card was based on self-declaration and unsupported by income tax records. The court also questioned the evidentiary value of the PAN card after the petitioner’s father admitted during cross-examination that he could not recall either his son’s year of birth or when he had first voted.The bench upheld the rejection of the petitioner’s school certificate as proof of parentage, noting that the issuing headmaster was not examined and the school admission register was not produced to verify its contents. The certificate had been issued on October 20, 2017, certifying that the petitioner had left the school on August 20, 1999.
