SILCHAR: A brother-sister pair in south Assam blacklisted as
illegal immigrants
from Bangladesh 17 years ago and another woman who faced the same ignominy in 2018 have had the verdicts against them overturned by different foreigners’ tribunals after a lengthy legal battle.
Bimal Das (45) and his sister Suma (43) lived with the tag of “foreigner” for more than a decade after an allegedly one-sided judgment in 2011 sealed proceedings initiated by police against them in 2006.
Bimal and Suma, who hail from Deopur in Karimganj, appealed against the order and were cleared by the foreigners’ tribunal-1 within two days of eachother last week.
Their lawyer, Brajaballav Goswami, said the siblings’ father,
Nilmani Das
(65), had also been labelled an illegal immigrant. He had his
citizenship
restored by the foreigners’ tribunal-1 on August 8 this year. A refugee registration card in Nilmani’s name and some other documents helped his cause.
The Das family’s travails had started in 2006 when the border police branded them people of “doubtful” origin in a monthly report.
Their cases were heard by the foreigners’ tribunal for years before an ex parte judgment against them in 2011. The trio was never arrested, Goswami said.
Dipti Malakar
, a resident of Balidighi of south Karimganj, received a clean chit from a foreigners’ tribunal on March 6 this year. The35-year-old woman had been declared a foreigner livingillegally in Assam by theborder police in 2018.
