‘Untrustworthy and Unbelievable’ foreigners.!34 These factors combine to make the functioning of these tribunals extremely arbitrary. Until 2019, around 117,000 persons had been declared as foreigners in the state. !35 Robust evidence does not exist currently with respect to the gender composition of the FTs. However, based on an interview with an experienced lawyer on the ground, we found that most of the members are male, but a not-insignificant number are women.!?¢ Future research would require data on the gender and ethnic composition of the members of the FT as well, which may help in substantiating the claim that heteronormative majoritarian patriarchy is reflected in the way in which FTs are constructed. We sought to take a closer look at how these challenges were manifesting as women interacted with the legal regime around citizenship. To this end, we scrutinised 15 randomly selected orders passed by the FTs to determine the citizenship of women. The cases were selected from FTs across several districts. Given that FTs do not publish their cases publicly, we relied on materials we collected from a local lawyer. We positioned case law as ethnographic source material and were able to draw several inferences from these texts. We identified the petitioners as women by the designation ‘W/O’ next to their names, which stands for ‘Wife of. In each of these orders, the petitioner’s claim to citizenship was denied. The addresses mentioned on the case files reveal that all these women whose citizenship is under challenge are from underdeveloped rural areas. Most tellingly, we were able to analyse the kind of documents that were produced by women to prove citizenship, and the grounds that were used to dismiss their citizenship documents. Type of document Land records Number of Cases 7 Grounds for rejection 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Damage Issuing authority not produced to testify Documents were issued post 1971 Woman did not know the details of the document Name of siblings mentioned on the document but not named in oral evidence Marriage Certificate 5 1. 2. 3. 134 135 136 Issuing authority not produced to testify Marriage registered years after the fact Spelling discrepancy Sagar, ‘How Assain’s Foreigners Tribunals, Aided by the High Court, Function like Kangaroo Courts and Persecute Its Minorities’, Zhe Caravan (online, 6 November 2019) <https://caravanmagazine.in/law/assam-foreigners-tribunals-function-like-kangaroo-courtspersecute-minorities>. ‘1.17 Lakh People Declared as Foreigners by Tribunals in Assam’, 7he Economic Times (online, 16 July 2019) <https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/117-lakh-people-declared-as-foreigners-by-tribunals-in-assam/articleshow/70244101.cms>. ‘Interview with Aman Wadud’ (n 130). 251