4. Violations of Natural Justice and the Right of Due Process At the heart of these failures is the FTs’ systematic violation of natural justice and due process. The tribunals routinely deny defendants the basic safeguards that define fair adjudication. They refuse to summon inquiry officers for cross-examination, thereby shielding defective and unlawful inquiries from scrutiny. They impose excessive, extra-legal burdens for proving documents and ignore wellestablished principles of evidence law, including the presumptive validity of public documents and the flexibility in proving authorship or contents. The FTs adopt hyper-technical approaches to discrepancies in names, addresses, and other particulars—disregarding context, linguistic variation, or cultural naming practices—and refuse to read evidence holistically. They fail to summon witnesses even when requested, and decline to assist litigants in securing official testimony, shifting unreasonable logistical and financial burdens onto individuals who are often impoverished and powerless. These procedural defects are not corrected, and are often reinforced, by the Gauhati High Court’s jurisprudence. Instead of acting as a constitutional safeguard against executive arbitrariness, the High Court has laid down norms that undermine fair trial rights and depart from settled legal principles. The Court’s approach has been marked by: ● Endorsing subjective, vague standards for referrals, enabling arbitrary initiation of proceedings; ● Downplaying the seriousness of defective inquiries and treating jurisdictional defects as mere technicalities; ● Insisting on unnecessary corroboration (such as requiring issuing authorities to produce contemporaneous records that do not exist in practice); 131 ● Dismissing legitimate procedural challenges as “routine” or frivolous, thus failing to engage with the structural barriers faced by defendants; ● Prioritising efficiency and system survival over legality and fairness, reflecting judicial anxiety that close scrutiny would expose the system’s illegality. The net effect is the emergence of a dismal legal regime that violates constitutional guarantees, including Articles 14, 21, and 22 of the Indian Constitution, as well as India’s obligations under international human rights law. The right to equality before the law, the right to a fair hearing, and the right against arbitrary deprivation of nationality are all rendered hollow in practice. The system has created conditions where citizenship determination no longer functions as a neutral, legal exercise but as a site of structural violence against marginalised communities—particularly Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam.