Latest
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Assam’s Citizenship Question and the Weight of History
Assam’s repeated re-determination of citizenship risks being disproportionate and rewriting a shared history of Assam and Bengal as one of intrusion.
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Judging the Foreigners, Part II: Training and Independence
Whether Foreigners Tribunal members should be advocates or judges, how they should be trained, and whether their dependence on the government allows them to be called independent.
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Judging the Foreigners, Part I: Who Sits in Judgment?
Foreigners Tribunals do the work of courts, so who sits on them, what qualifications they hold and whether their independence is secured deserve far closer scrutiny.
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Suspicion as Procedure: A Constitutional Critique of the MHA’s 2025 Deportation SOP
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ letter of 2 May 2025 builds a complete apparatus of identification, detention, removal and civil erasure without once mentioning a court, a tribunal or a hearing. An administrative and constitutional critique.
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The Attorney General’s Concession: Hans Muller and the Limits of Detaining Foreigners
In Hans Muller, India’s first Attorney General accepted that an unrestricted executive power to detain foreigners could not survive the Constitution. The logic of that concession still matters.
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Identifying the ‘Outsider’: An Assessment of Foreigners Tribunals in Assam
Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals decide whether a person belongs to India. They were never created by Parliament, and their design does not meet the promise of effective adjudication under the Constitution.
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The Foreigners Act, 1946: Its Preamble and the Constitution
Document: The Foreigners Act, 1946 (31 of 1946), dated 23rd November, 1946, as amended. Download the Act (PDF) Status: This Act has been repealed by the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, which came into force on 1 September 2025. It…
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Gender, Documents and the Burden of Belonging
There is a particular cruelty in a law that asks a woman to prove where she came from, using papers that were never written with her in mind. Citizenship, in the form it takes before a tribunal, is rarely a…
