Guwahati: The Gauhati High Court has dismissed a writ petition filed by a 38-year-old resident, ruling that the 15 distinct documents he submitted were legally insufficient to verify his Indian citizenship.
A Division Bench comprising Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Shamima Jahan upheld the earlier decree of a Foreigners’ Tribunal, which had designated the petitioner, a daily wage labourer residing in Guwahati, as a foreigner. The court declared that the individual had completely failed to discharge the strict reverse burden of proof mandated under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946.
The petitioner's extensive documentation included computerized extracts of the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) alongside historical land deeds and various voter lists spanning several decades. However, the court identified critical inconsistencies, pointing out that his grandfather's name was recorded with four different spellings. Furthermore, the ancestral lineage failed to show continuous, verifiable links across the three distinct villages where the family had claimed to reside.
The Bench also rejected supplementary items, including a school certificate, a PAN card, and a voter identity card, reiterating that such documents do not independently validate nationality without flawless ancestral linkage records. Additionally, the court ruled that the oral testimony provided by the petitioner’s father was legally inadequate to substitute for the missing documentary gaps.