Assam is weaponising a Partition-era law to let officials strip those accused of being illegal migrants of citizenship and expel them in 24 hours—a new model of extra-judicial mass disenfranchisement that may now spread across the country.
On 9 September 2025, the Assam cabinet approved the framing of a new set of “standard operating procedures” (SOP), as the new plan is called in officialese, under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to identify, detain and expel supposed illegals.
The announcement came two months after the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced during a press conference that his government would now invoke the 1950 law to expel ‘illegal migrants’ without relying on the existing Foreigners Tribunals (FT) system.
The SOP, according to the government’s press release, will empower district commissioners (DC) across Assam to summon suspected illegals, demand evidence of their Indian citizenship, make a decision on their citizenship status and finally, order their expulsion or detention within 24 hours.
The DCs will also separately have the power to order the expulsion of those “declared foreign nationals” (DFNs) by an FT. The SOP, further, seeks to formalise the ongoing “pushbacks”—forcing suspected illegals across the border, often at gun point—to Bangladesh “without any further process”.
The proposed SOP is only the latest manifestation of a distinct form of legal lawlessness that the Assam government has been perfecting over the last few months as part of its multi-pronged offensive against the state’s Bengali Muslim minority.
Majoritarian Lawfare
You can call the Sarma government’s plan majoritarian lawfare, designed and executed with the specific intent of driving fear and anxiety among religious minorities while unifying the Hindutva vote bank in the run up to next year’s assembly election.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
