Supreme Court wants cases of SIR excluded to be decided before next polls. A reality check from Assam

It is the only state where the presence of voters in electoral lists has been contested on grounds of citizenship at this scale. In 1997, around 3 lakh of them were first marked ‘D-voters’ or ‘Doubtful Voters’ during an intensive revision of rolls. Ahead of this year’s Assam Assembly elections, over 93,000 were still ‘D’ voters, with cases dragging on through tribunals and courts. There is no clear data on how many have been marked ‘D’ voters since 1997.

The 1997 Intensive Revision

The revision of electoral rolls held nearly 30 years ago in Assam involved “verification” by ‘Local Verification Officers (LVOs)’ of cases of people who had been provisionally included in the draft voting list but where “linkages could not be established with earlier rolls”. Establishing linkages with the previous SIR in respective states is one of the prime requirements of the EC’s ongoing SIR exercise too.

In Assam’s case, the LVOs submitted reports to respective Election Registration Officers (EROs), and where the EROs “had reasonable doubt about the citizenship of any person”, they forwarded the cases to the “competent authority”, which was the Superintendent of Police of the district concerned. Police then referred these cases for “determination” to Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs) or Illegal Migrants Determination Tribunals (IMDT), in place since 1964 and 1983 in Assam, respectively, due to its long history of immigration and citizenship anxieties.

After the IMDT Act was struck down as “unconstitutional” in 2005, all cases were transferred to FTs. Unlike in the case of IMDTs, where the onus on proving citizenship was on the complainant and the authorities, in the case of FTs, those accused of being suspected foreigners had to prove their case. (The Supreme Court’s order giving the EC a four-week window to report the SIR deletions also essentially shifts the burden on the deleted individual to prove their citizenship.)

‘D’ was put after the names in the voter list of all people in Assam whose cases had not been decided by tribunals –  indicating that their citizenship status was disputed or ‘Doubtful’. If declared Indian, they would remain on the voter list, with the ‘D’ mark removed, but if ruled to be foreigner, they would have their names deleted and be moved to detention centres pending deportation.

Following a Supreme Court order, those who have spent two years in detention centres without having their cases cleared can now be released on bail.

The numbers

Lawyers who have been working on citizenship matters in Assam tell The Indian Express that the biggest round of mass marking of people as D-voters took place in 1997, but people were also tagged thus in 2005, when an intensive revision was conducted in Assam last.

In 2012, a ‘White Paper on Foreigners Issue’ brought out by the Assam government recorded 2,31,657 such references to competent authorities. The paper said that between 1998 and July 2012 (14 years), 6,590 people had been declared foreigners by tribunals, while more than six times that number, 44,220, ended up being declared Indian.

In a recent submission before the Assembly, the Assam government said that till January 31, 2025, a little over 77,000 ‘D’ voters had been declared Indians, while 1.18 lakh cases were still pending.

Ahead of the Assam Assembly elections this year, the EC conducted a Special Revision in December 2025 – unlike the SIR in other poll-bound states, due to the different citizenship processes in Assam. In the voter list released after the Special Revision, the number of people marked as ‘D’ voters was 93,021.

The bottlenecks

The functioning of FTs has been frequently criticised as being “arbitrary”, apart from drawing criticism over the long delays when cases reach them.

Senior advocate Hafiz Rashid Ahmed Choudhury, who has represented many people before FTs, says the long drawn-out process means many wait years just for the chance to defend themselves at tribunals.

Choudhury points to another gap. “Once the ‘D’ was put against a name, it didn’t mean a person had to come before a tribunal immediately… The ERO has to refer it to police, who in turn must refer it to the tribunal. Over the years, we have seen so many ‘D’ voters who are not able to fight their case in tribunals because it has not been referred, and they have not got the notice.”

FTs are presided over by quasi-judicial officers. A former FT member told The Indian Express: “Once a person appears before a tribunal with a written statement and documentary evidence, a case can be disposed of within a month. But there is institutional lethargy from all directions, as well as systemic problems like a lack of staff and facilities at tribunals.”

There are currently 100 FTs in Assam. A Gauhati High Court Bench which monitors the functioning of these tribunals, in an order as recently as June 2, remarked on the lack of facilities in them, noting: “This also demonstrates that the intention of the Govt. is not to allow the Foreigners Tribunal to function in an appropriate manner.”

Even after a person has been declared a foreigner by FTs, he or she has the option of moving the High Court and Supreme Court. In the most recent case, the Supreme Court ordered status quo on the deportation of five women, after they had lost their case before the Gauhati High Court and an FT.

Since last year, the Assam government has escalated a process of “pushbacks” or informal deportations into Bangladesh of declared foreigners.