1. Framing the Intervention 21 and international legal obligations operate together to bind Indian authorities, offering a principled and enforceable standard against which the FT system must be assessed. Second, the report provides an unprecedented empirical account of how the FT system functions in practice. It draws on a detailed review of 1,193 Gauhati High Court orders (2009–2019), Supreme Court jurisprudence (2017–2024), and interviews with lawyers including nine in-depth case studies of FT cases (see Annexure). In doing so, it offers a grounded, granular understanding of how injustice is produced and reproduced across the FT process—from police referral and tribunal trial to judicial review. Third, in doing so, this report presents the first sustained analysis of the Gauhati High Court’s jurisprudence in FT matters. It argues that the High Court has not merely failed to correct procedural and evidentiary flaws but has actively entrenched them. Through inconsistent rulings, selective legal reasoning, and an overly restrictive approach to its constitutional role, the Court has normalised practices that turn minor documentary inconsistencies into pivotal determinants of citizenship status, ignore structural disadvantage, and downplay the devastating consequences of citizenship loss. By failing to articulate coherent legal standards or offering meaningful guidance to tribunals, the Court has allowed arbitrariness to flourish under the guise of legal neutrality. Fourth, the report shifts the analytical lens from isolated institutional error to the FT regime as a legally sanctioned and judicially sustained system of exclusion. It situates the FTs within a broader ecosystem—including the police, the Home Department, the judiciary, and the legal frameworks of the Foreigners Act and the Citizenship Act. By tracing how these institutions interact, it demonstrates that procedural injustice is not accidental but structural. The rules, far from being random, function in systematic disregard of the lived realities, documents, cultures, and constraints of affected communities—and in doing so, punish individuals for being who they are. What emerges is not an arbitrary or chaotic process, but an exclusionary structure that operates with internal coherence and a deeply unequal logic. 21 22 23 24 25 26 For a representative sample of important work on this question, see Amnesty International India, ‘Designed to Exclude: How India’s Courts Are Allowing Foreigners Tribunals to Render People Stateless in Assam’ (2019) <https://www.amnesty.be/IMG/pdf/rapport_inde.pdf> accessed 24 June 2025; Talha Abdul Rahman, ‘Identifying the “Outsider”: An Assessment of Foreigner Tribunals in the Indian State of Assam’ (2020) 2 The Statelessness & Citizenship Review 112; Fariya Yesmin, ‘Beyond Papers: Understanding the Making of Citizenship in the Foreigners’ Tribunals of Assam’ (2024) 32 Contemporary South Asia 475; Sital Kalantry and Agnidipto Tarafder, ‘Death by Paperwork: Determination of Citizenship and Detention of Alleged Foreigners in Assam’ (2021) Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper; Padmini Baruah, ‘“The Right to Have Rights”: Assam and the Legal Politics of Citizenship’ (2020) 16 Socio-Legal Review 17; Siddhartha Deb, ‘“They Are Manufacturing Foreigners”: How India Disenfranchises Muslims’ The New York Times Magazine (15 September 2021) <https://www. nytimes.com/2021/09/15/magazine/india-assam-muslims.html> accessed 29 June 2025; Makepeace Sitlhou, ‘Strangers in Their Own Land: Assam’s Bengali-Origin Muslims Face Disenfranchisement and Indignity’ [2022] The Baffler 26; Mohsin Alam Bhat, ‘(Un)Credible Citizen: Citizenship Dispossession, Documents and the Politics of the Rule of Law’ (2024) 50 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 4867; Rohini Mohan, ‘“Worse Than a Death Sentence”: Inside India’s Sham Trials That Could Strip Millions of Citizenship’ VICE (29 July 2019) <https:// www.vice.com/en/article/worse-than-a-death-sentence-inside-indias-sham-trials-that-could-strip-millions-of-citizenship/> accessed 29 June 2025; Sagar, ‘How Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals, Aided by the High Court, Function like Kangaroo Courts and Persecute Its Minorities’ (The Caravan, 6 November 2019) <https://caravanmagazine.in/law/assam-foreigners-tribunals-function-like-kangaroo-courts-persecuteminorities> accessed 15 January 2025. Sitlhou (n 21); Trisha Sabhapandit and Padmini Baruah, ‘“Untrustworthy and Unbelievable”: Women and the Quest for Citizenship in Assam’ (2021) 3 The Statelessness & Citizenship Review 236; Nazimuddin Siddique and Sujata Ramachandran, ‘The Punitive Gap: NRC, Due Process and Denationalisation Politics in India’s Assam’ (2024) 12 Comparative Migration Studies 34. Kalantry and Tarafder (n 21) 20-22; Baruah (n 21) 25. Nargis Choudhury, ‘Access to Justice for Women under Foreigner’s Tribunal Act, 1946 in Assam’ (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group 2023) Policies and Practices 148 <http://www.mcrg.ac.in/PP148.pdf> accessed 24 June 2025; Sabhapandit and Baruah (n 22). Response by Minister of State for Home Affairs, Unstarred Question No 1724, Lok Sabha (2 July 2019); Response by Minister of State for Home Affairs, Unstarred Question No 3558, Lok Sabha (10 December 2019). Sagar (n 21); Amnesty International India (n 21).