THE DRAMA OF DEPORTATION

Ahead of the 2026 assembly election, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma invokes an old law and pushes an identity-driven narrative to eject illegal Bangladeshis

- BY KAUSHIK DEKA

AS ASSAM GEARS UP FOR ASSEMBLY ELECTION EARLY NEXT YEAR, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has already set a combative tone for the campaign. In recent months, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has launched an aggressive, and legally contentious, drive to identify and deport “illegal Bangladeshis”. This move has involved reviving decades-old laws, sidelining the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and stirring a combustible mix of security, identity and religion in the state's political discourse.

Partly prompted by judicial developments but largely driven by electoral calculations, the Sarma government has intensified efforts to deport individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants, particularly those of Bangladeshi origin. What marks this phase as particularly significant is a new legal interpretation: even those included in the NRC, the Supreme Court-monitored citizenship register, are not necessarily safe from deportation iflater declared foreigners by the state’s quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals (FT) that determine citizenship status through an adversarial process. This reinterpretation quietly nullifies the political and administrative heft of the NRC exerci.

The NRC was conceived as the definitive solution to Assam’s decades-old “foreigner problem”, a comprehensive register that would once and for all separate genuine Indian citizens from illegal immigrants. The exercise consumed enormous resources and generated tremendous anxiety across the state before finally producing its results in 2019. However, the outcome satisfied no one. Of the 33 million applicants, 1.9 million were excluded from the final list, a number that BJP leaders, including Sarma, deemed suspiciously low.