A general view of Supreme Court.
| Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
Justice J.B. Pardiwala, the lone dissenting judge on the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench, on Thursday (October 17, 2024) argued that Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, incentivises undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh to stay in Assam indefinitely until they are detected.
Justice Pardiwala specifically referred to how Section 6A(3) mandated that for migrants to register as citizens, they must first be detected as foreigners.
However, the mechanism in Section 6A did not provide for self-declaration or voluntary detection as a foreigner. The process of detection could only be set in motion by the State.
The judge concluded that this was a clear departure from the scheme of the Citizenship Act and Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution which allows acquiring citizenship through registration.
Besides, Section 6A(3) did not prescribe an outer time limit for the detection of an immigrant to Assam as a foreigner.
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“Thus, an immigrant whose name figures in the electoral roll, despite being a foreigner, continues to be eligible to vote in the elections till that person is detected as a foreigner and the name of that person is struck off the electoral roll. There being no temporal limit to the applicability of Section 6A, this situation would continue in the years to come till the detection exercise is completed,” Justice Pardiwala wrote.
Placing the onus on the State to detect a foreigner coupled with the absence of temporal limit allows immigrants to continue to be on the electoral rolls and enjoy being de facto citizens, Justice Pardiwala reasoned.
The judge also found Section 6A arbitrary for the reason that the name of a person detected as a foreigner today would be deleted from the electoral rolls for 10 years from the date of detection. He held that this consequence was not in consonance with the object of early detection, deportation and conferment of citizenship.
In his dissent, the judge ordered that Section 6A and its benefits should not apply to immigrants in Assam from the date of this judgment.
Published – October 17, 2024 11:57 pm IST
