Section 6A of Citizenship Act open to abuse due to forged documents: Justice J B Pardiwala
New Delhi (PTI): Dissenting from the majority judgment, Supreme Court's Justice J B Pardiwala on Thursday held that Section 6A of the Citizenship Act of 1955, which grants Indian citizenship to immigrants who entered Assam between January 1, 1966, and March 25, 1971, was arbitrary and constitutionally invalid.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Pardiwala said the open-ended nature of Section 6A had become more prone to abuse due to the advent of forged documents.
"The open-ended nature of Section 6A has, with the passage time, become more prone to abuse due to the advent of forged documents to establish, inter-alia (among other things), wrong date of entry into Assam, inaccurate lineage, falsified government records created by corrupt officials, dishonest corroboration of the date of entry by other relatives so as to aid illegal immigrants who are otherwise not eligible under Section 6A by virtue of having entered into Assam after March 24,1971," he noted in a separate 127-page dissenting judgement.
Justice Pardiwala said Section 6A promotes further immigration into Assam without any end date of application and immigrants come hoping with forged documents to set up the defence of belonging to pre-1966 or the 1966-71 stream upon identification as a foreigner and reference to the tribunal.
The judge said while the object that was sought to be achieved with the enactment of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act remained a distant dream, its misuse had only continued to increase with the passage of time.
"I say so because with the passage of time, the government records would get damaged and perish, making it increasingly difficult to cross-check the false claims that may be made by the immigrants of the post-1971 stream trying to misuse the benefits conferred exclusively to the immigrants of the pre1971 stream," observed Justice Pardiwala.
He further said that Section 6A, in the absence of any temporal limit to its application, was being counter-productive to the object of enactment.
"Neither Section 6A nor the rules made thereunder prescribe any outer time-limit for the completion of detection of all such persons who belong to the 1966-71 stream and are eligible to avail the benefits of Section 6A(3). The clock only starts to tick once the detection is made by the foreigners tribunal and there is no prescription as to the period of time within which the exercise of detection is to be completed from the commencement of Section 6A," he underlined.
Justice Pardiwala said the absence of any prescribed time-limit for detection of foreigners of the 1966-71 stream has adverse consequences as it relieved the state from the burden of legally identifying, detecting, and deleting from the electoral rolls, all immigrants of the stream.
"Secondly, it incentivises the immigrants belonging to the 1966-71 stream to continue to remain on the electoral rolls for an indefinite period and only get themselves registered under Section 6A once detected by a competent tribunal. Hence, the manner in which the provision is worded, counter-serves the very purpose of its enactment," the judge said.
Justice Pardiwala said that Section 6A had failed the test of temporal arbitrariness or temporal unreasonableness, acquiring unconstitutionality with the passage of time.
The mandate of timely detection and deportation of illegal immigrants was the fundamental premise on which the Assam Accord was signed, the minority verdict highlighted.
According to the judge, this intention was never translated statutorily, owing to a faulty mechanism prescribed under Section 6A(3), either due to "inadvertence or advertence" of the legislature.
"I have reached the conclusion that Section 6A of the Citizenship Act deserves to be declared invalid with prospective effect," he added.
However, the majority verdict of the apex court Constitution bench led by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud upheld the constitutional validity of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act and said the Assam Accord was a political solution to the problem of illegal migration.
Section 6A was inserted into the Citizenship Act as a special provision to deal with the citizenship of people covered under the Assam Accord.
The provision was incorporated in 1985 following the signing of the Assam Accord between the then Rajiv Gandhi government at the Centre and the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU).
It says those who came to Assam on or after January 1, 1966, but before March 25, 1971, from specified territories, including Bangladesh, in accordance with the Citizenship Act amended in 1985, and are residents of the northeastern state since then, must register themselves under Section 18 of the Act for acquiring Indian citizenship.
As a result, the provision fixes March 25, 1971, as the cut-off date for granting citizenship to migrants, particularly the ones from Bangladesh, residing in Assam.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
