Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in India depending on whether they come from someone deemed ‘original’ inhabitant or ‘non-original’. Furthermore, arbitrariness is written into the law as Section 3(3) of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules 2003 mentions ‘persons originally inhabitants of the State of Assam’, without any definition or the basis for identifying such ‘original inhabitants’. This fuzziness has been used by NRC authorities to arbitrarily reject documents provided by minorities in physical verification proceedings, resulting in the disproportionate exclusion from NRC of Bengali-speaking persons. The state has had a long history of arbitrarily disenfranchising minorities in Assam, particularly Bengali-speaking Muslims. Immediately after Independence, The Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act 1950 was used to identify ‘suspected foreigners’ and push them over the borders into the then East Pakistan. This was renamed the Prevention of Immigration Scheme (PIP) in the early 1960s, again targeting Bengali-speaking Muslims.48 Under mounting criticism, the quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals (FTs) were established, under the Foreigners (Tribunal) Orders 1964, to provide a semblance of due process, and these have continued to function to this day. Since the tribunals test claims to citizenship using the Foreigners Act, 1946, the outcomes are generally foregone conclusions. The Foreigners Act shifts the burden of proof to the applicant, who is required to satisfy the tribunal of the genuineness of his or her claim. The fact that victims are mostly destitute and poorly educated, and that government recordkeeping is neither efficient nor accessible, makes this requirement unfulfillable for many. In 1983, the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT) corrected the reversal of burden of proof in FT proceedings, to the prosecution. But under an orchestrated campaign by a lobby of Assamese nativists and Hindu nationalists, the IMDT Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005, reviving the arbitrariness of FTs in making foreigners out of long-standing 48 Gaurav Das, ‘NRC Tsunami Bypasses Assam Island,’ Telegraph India, July 25, 2018, https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/north-east/nrc-tsunamibypasses-assam-island/cid/1455872. 57