Only, The Indian Express has found that Ali died over two-and-a-half years before the verdict, carrying the heavy tag of a “foreigner” and “illegal immigrant from Bangladesh” to his grave.
Ali, a resident of Kashimpur village in Assam’s Nalbari district, died in his village on December 28, 2021 at the age of 58, even as the apex court continued to hear his case.
This was after the Tribunal had delivered an ex-parte order in 2012 declaring him a foreigner since he had not appeared before it, stating that he “had failed to discharge his burden” under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act.
When he appealed against this in the Gauhati High Court on the ground that he was unable to appear before the Tribunal because of a medical condition, the petition was dismissed. Then, he had approached the Supreme Court, which directed the case to a Foreigners’ Tribunal in 2017 to again decide whether he was a foreigner or not.
This time too, the Tribunal declared him a foreigner, pointing to discrepancies in spellings and dates in some of the documents he had produced.
Advocate Kaushik Choudhury, who represented Ali in the Supreme Court, said he had been doing so pro bono after the case was handed to him by a lower court lawyer. Choudhury said he was not aware of his death.
“It never came to our knowledge. The only way we could have known this was if it had been communicated by either the family or the state, but that was not the case. The people in these cases are not educated, so the information remained with them,” he said.
Ali’s son Mojibur Rahman said that after his death, nobody in the family had spoken to any lawyer.
At their village, Ali’s wife Hajera Bibi (51) said his biggest fear through his entire legal battle was that “he would be taken away by the police.”
In fact, she recalled that after he was declared a foreigner by the Tribunal, he avoided sleeping at home for three whole months. “He was afraid that the police would come at night and take him away. So he would quietly leave every night and spend it in someone else’s house. Nobody except me knew he was not at home, not even my children,” she recalled.
His family discovered that the Supreme Court had declared him an Indian citizen only three days ago, when The Indian Express reached out to village community members looking for Ali. When a digital copy of the judgment was sent to them, his sons were not able to read it. His eldest son, Habibar Rahman (36), said that a cousin, who is a pharmacist, explained it to them.
His name being cleared after years of living under the shadow of the foreigner tag tastes mostly bitter to Hajera Bibi.
“What is the point now? The fear that he lived under, of being taken away, died with him. If they still wanted to call him a foreigner, what would they have done? Picked him up from his grave?” she asked.
The burden of continuously fighting the citizenship battle since 2012, the family said, had also taken a heavy financial toll. Ali worked as a labourer on other people’s land and his two sons are daily wagers as well.
Mojibur Rahman recounted the lengths they went to to cover the legal and transportation costs — they sold three of their four cows, five goats, one katha of Ali’s father’s land, and mortgaged one of their two bighas of land. His estimate is that they spent around Rs 2.5 lakh on the case.
Although they have been staying in Kashimpur since 1997, the family still lives in a kutcha house, with some parts made of corrugated tin sheets and mud structures. Only one part of the house, where Hajera Bibi sleeps – next to a trunk filled with the family’s carefully collected identity documents and papers, to prove their citizenship – has a brick foundation.
“I was doing daily wage labour in Manipur and sent some money (to build a house) because it seemed that the matter was quietening down. Then, the case was sent to a Tribunal again and we needed the money, so our efforts to build a pucca house stopped there. There have been no savings all these years,” Mojibur said.
In observations that could have a bearing on other cases where people have had, or are in the process of having, their citizenship scrutinised in Assam’s Foreigners’ Tribunals, the Supreme Court Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Ahsanuddin Amanullah had questioned the basis on which Rahim Ali’s citizenship had first come into question in 2004.
The court had, in particular, criticised the way the case had been initiated by the border police, without providing any grounds for their “suspicion” that he was an “illegal immigrant”.
Hajera Bibi said that one day, the police just arrived at their house and served him a notice to appear before the Tribunal. “We were never told why, and we never found out why,” she said.
The Supreme Court had also pointed out that the police had specifically alleged that he was originally from Dorijahangirpur village, under Torail police station in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district, and that he had migrated from there after March 25, 1971. The court had remarked that if the police had such specific allegations, surely they would have had some material to support it and cite to the accused.
Asked if she knew this village that her husband was alleged to be from, Hajera Bibi started laughing. “I can only laugh out of sorrow at this,” she said.
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