New Delhi: In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutional validity of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, which grants Indian citizenship to Bangladeshi immigrants who entered Assam before March 25, 1971 .
Section 6A was inserted in the Citizenship Act, 1955, after the Assam Accord was signed in 1985 between the then Rajiv Gandhi government and agitating groups led by Prafulla Mahanta, including the All Assam Students’ Union in the state. It is believed that the judgment will embolden those who oppose granting Indian citizenship to immigrants who entered Assam after March 25, 1971.
According to this provision, all persons who came to Assam from Bangladesh on or after January 1, 1966 but before March 25, 1971, when the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 1985 came into force and Anyone thereafter is a resident of Assam and can register for Indian citizenship. The article therefore fixed March 25, 1971 as the cut-off date for granting citizenship to immigrants, especially those from Bangladesh, living in Assam.
While the CJI, Justices Kant, Sandresh and Misra upheld the constitutional validity of Article 6A, Justice JB Pardiwala dissented in the minority verdict. The CJI considered the cut-off date of March 25, 1971 as reasonable and stated in its own article that the purpose of incorporating Section 6A was to reduce the influx of immigrants into India and to deal with those who had already immigrated.
CJI Chandrachud said Section 6A does not violate Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution, which lays down the deadline for granting citizenship to immigrants from east and west Pakistan “when the Constitution comes into force”. Legislative solutions. Section 6A cannot be read in isolation from legislation previously enacted by Parliament to deal with the influx of immigrants of Indian origin… Section 6A is yet another statutory intervention in a long line of legislation aimed at balancing the humanitarian needs of immigrants of Indian origin. ancestry and the impact of such migration on the economic and cultural needs of Indian states,” he wrote.
The CJI said that while other states like West Bengal (2216.7 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Tripura (856 km) and Mizoram (318 km) have smaller borders with Bangladesh than Assam (263 km) is larger, but the scale of the influx has a greater impact on the cultural and political rights of Assam and its tribal population.
Taking note of the data on record, the CJI stated that the total number of migrants in Assam is around 40 lakh, West Bengal has 57 lakh, Meghalaya has 30,000 and Tripura has 3.25 lakh, as one can imagine, The impact of migration is likely to be greater in Assam than elsewhere because of its smaller population and land area compared to West Bengal.
“Due to the high number of migrants from East Pakistan to Assam after the partition of India, and also after Operation Searchlight (launched by the Pakistan Army to contain the nationalist movement in Bangladesh), the migration from East Pakistan to Assam The number of immigrants will increase, so the measure is against its goal of reducing immigration and granting citizenship to immigrants of Indian origin…Article 6A is neither under-inclusive nor over-inclusive,” he wrote.
Justice Surya Kant, writing for himself and Justices Sundresh and Misra, said that Article 6A is constitutional and does not violate the fundamental principles of brotherhood. in principle. “We consider that Section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955 is constitutional and is a valid piece of legislation,” Justice Kant wrote.
Stressing that the statutory mechanism for identifying illegal immigrants in Assam is inadequate, Justice Kant said the implementation of immigration and citizenship legislation cannot depend solely on the will and discretion of the authorities and therefore requires continuous supervision by the courts.
“While Article 6A grants citizenship rights only to migrants who arrive before the deadline, there seems to be a continuous influx of migrants into various border states of India. This constant migration poses major challenges due to porous borders and incomplete fencing,” The majority verdict stood.
Dissenting from the majority judgment, Justice Padivala held that Section 6A of the Citizenship Act was arbitrary and constitutionally invalid. He said the open-ended nature of Section 6A became more susceptible to abuse due to the emergence of forged documents. “With the passage of time, the open-ended nature of Section 6A became more open to abuse as forged documents emerged, inter alia, to fix the wrong date of entry into Assam to aid March 24, 1971 and then entered Assam and therefore does not qualify as an illegal immigrant under Section 6A,” he said in another 127-page dissenting judgment.
The judgment came on the basis of 17 petitions filed by NGOs Assam Public Works Organisation, Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha and others.
