1. Framing the Intervention 1.1 The Stakes 16 Citizenship status lies at the heart of the constitutional order. As India’s Supreme Court has affirmed, citizenship is the gateway to all other fundamental rights.6 Any process that risks its arbitrary denial must therefore meet the highest standards of procedural fairness, evidentiary integrity, and judicial oversight. Yet, as this report documents, the FT regime consistently falls short. The FTs operate without adequate judicial safeguards; their procedures vary dramatically; and the reasoning in many cases is either absent, contradictory, or disconnected from the lived realities of those trapped within the system. Meanwhile, the Gauhati High Court, rather than acting as a site of correction, has more often than not upheld or enabled these deficiencies. Its decisions have repeatedly refused to entertain challenges to defective inquiries, enabled people to be declared foreigners without a hearing, imposed unpredictable and cumbersome evidentiary thresholds, and failed to articulate consistent legal standards. Indian Supreme Court in Re : Section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955 (2024) Para 5 “In the domestic context, citizenship was ascertained by a 9-Judge Bench of this Court in State Trading Corpn. of India Ltd. v. CTO, as the ‘right to have rights’. It was held that citizenship is the prerequisite that leads to gaining legal status and other socio-political rights in a country.” Para 9 “Citizenship provides a sense of belongingness and esteem, apart from furthering the selfactualization needs of individuals. Collectively, citizenship provides an ‘identity’ to individuals, which has a significant impact on the quality of their lives and their individual psyche.” Para 11 “Though citizenship is one sub-set among many possible ways of being a member of a polity, it is the most significant one.” The consequences of this failure are profound. As of January 2025, Assam’s FTs have declared 165,992 people as foreigners.7 Citizenship decisions in Assam have led to mass detention. In January 2025, 266 people were reportedly being held in detention centres, with periodic numbers being as high as 826 in 2017, 428 in 2018 and 1043 in 2019.8 Thousands more live in the fear of being summoned. The Assam Government has reported that 452 persons have been repatriated from March 2013 to January 2025. As of January 2025, over 30,115 persons have been “push back deported”. As of January 2025, 273 persons have been released on bail from the detention centre on completion of 3 years as per a Supreme Court order (Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1045/2018). 527 persons have been released on bail after completion of 2 years as per the Supreme Court order, and an order of the Gauhati High Court in Writ Petition (Civil) (Suo Moto) No. 1 of 2020.