In early 2025, a new structure was introduced in Assam for identifying and expelling alleged “illegal immigrants” under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, primarily driven by the executive. Through a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) quietly approved by the state Cabinet, District Commissioners (DC) and Senior Superintendents of Police (SSP) were authorised to issue expulsion orders if a suspect could not provide satisfactory proof of Indian citizenship within ten days of receiving the notice, and a twenty-four–hour removal period thereafter. The SOP is intended to formalise the process under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, and to outline a strict timeline for officials to identify and remove suspected non-citizens. While governments often sell such changes as “efficiency,” what’s actually happening is the rewriting of due process. Constitutional obligations of fairness are reduced to deadlines that most vulnerable people can never realistically meet. The DC and SSP now hold final authority, with little oversight, deciding in effect who counts as a citizen and who does not.
When Administrative Orders Replace Adjudication
Until now, citizenship disputes in Assam have been heard by Foreigners’ Tribunals, institutions that operate on the principles of adversarial adjudication. These tribunals used to issue reasoned orders, admit documentary evidence, hear cross-examination, and permit appeals. Their flaws were numerous, and well-documented, but they preserved one essential idea: that the question of whether a person is or is not an Indian citizen demands due process.
The new mechanism collapses that legal architecture. The officer issuing the notice is effectively the investigator, prosecutor, and final authority on the person’s fate. Now, however, decisions no longer rest on a hearing or a judicial assessment of evidence; they rely on whether, and how well, an individual can piece together documentation in ten days, a timeline that would be unrealistic even for the well-resourced, let alone for daily-wage workers, rural families, minorities such as tribes, or individuals displaced multiple times by floods or violence.
The transformation is even more severe since the expulsion order does not require a detailed explanation or any engagement with the evidence presented. It converts a legal proceeding into a file noting. With no independent scrutiny and no protection from political pressure, the process becomes vulnerable to both error and systematic misuse.
Natural Justice and the Collapse of Procedural Fairness
Procedural fairness depends not only on the right to be heard but on the right to be heard meaningfully. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that the “procedure established by law” under Article 21 must be right, just and fair, not arbitrary or oppressive, effectively constitutionalising the core principles of natural justice in administrative and executive action. A ten-day deadline reduces that safeguard to little more than a mere illusion. It overlooks the everyday realities of documentation in Assam. Birth records, land papers, school certificates, and other identity documents are often lost in floods. Names frequently appear differently on electoral rolls because of transliteration or spelling variations. And many women, in particular, may not possess documents in their own names at all. Under these circumstances, expecting people to gather and present proof within ten days is not simply demanding. For many, it is practically impossible.
Speed becomes a tool of exclusion. Within the twenty-four–hour deportation window, the theoretical right to judicial review collapses with no remedy. No legal aid system can realistically mobilise in that time. No family will be able to gather evidence. No lawyer has the power to file an urgent petition. Judicial review becomes a decorative formality; while it may be available, it is practically impossible to obtain.
This violates the essence of natural justice, recognised not only under Article 21, as mentioned previously in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, but repeatedly affirmed in decisions of the Supreme Court, such as in cases like K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, in which, while primarily a privacy case, the Court emphasised that procedural fairness and due process are core to Article 21. Fairness is not an optional requirement that can be easily dispensed with for the convenience of those in administrative power. Citizenship goes to the root of an individual’s identity, liberty, and political membership in the State. A process that denies time and structural review is inherently incompatible with constitutional due process.
Articles 14: Why the Policy Fails Constitutional Scrutiny
Article 14 imposes a basic discipline on State power. Executive action affecting liberty or legal status must not be arbitrary; it has to be procedurally fair and structured in a manner that permits meaningful review. Article 14, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held in cases such as Basheshar Nath v. The Commissioner of Income-tax, strikes at arbitrariness in State action.
The expulsion mechanism outlined in the Assam Standard Operating Procedure fails to meet these requirements at the structural level. The same executive authority is the one that assesses the person, their adequacy of citizenship documents, and then enforces the expulsion order. Investigative and coercive functions are collapsed into a single office, having no requirement of a reasoned order or independent assessment. As the Court cautioned in Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner, fairness in decision-making is not an optional requirement that can be replaced for convenience.
This design renders arbitrariness inevitable rather than exceptional. Decisions that are unreasoned and protected from effective challenge cannot satisfy constitutional standards. The Supreme Court has emphasised that even administrative action carrying civil consequences must conform to the principles of natural justice. A procedure that forecloses time, representation, and review empties those principles of content.
The effects of this framework are predictably uneven. It works in a context where access to documentation has deep inequalities, mostly putting religious minorities, Bengali-speaking communities, women, internal migrants, and economically vulnerable households at risk. Although it is formally neutral, the procedure reproduces exclusion in practice. In constitutional terms, this is arbitrariness with consequences.
Article 14 is not confined to facial classifications. The Supreme Court has long recognised that even formally neutral State action may fail constitutional scrutiny where its operation produces unequal and exclusionary effects. The prohibition on arbitrariness and the doctrine of reasonable classification both require attention to how a policy functions in practice, not merely how it is framed.
The expulsion procedure does not expressly distinguish between classes of persons. Yet its design assumes that every individual has equal access to documentation, time, legal assistance, and a familiarity with a law that is distributed unevenly. Given that this is an area that is marked by displacement, inconsistent record-keeping, and structural documentation gaps, rigid timelines and executive discretion do not operate uniformly. Compliance is realistic for some; for others, it is structurally foreclosed.
What results is not discrimination by declaration, but discrimination by design. Women without independent documents, linguistic minorities, and economically vulnerable households are disproportionately exposed because the system is calibrated to exclude them. Under Article 14, such outcomes are not peripheral; they are constitutionally determinative.
The Backlog Argument and Why It Fails
The government frames the new mechanism for the prevention of tribunal backlogs. But backlogs do not justify abandoning adjudication altogether; rather, they reflect a shortage of judges and infrastructure, not an inherent flaw in the adjudicatory model. The solution should have been investment and reform, not replacement.
The executive’s claim of “efficient removal” also rings hollow when viewed alongside India’s diplomatic reality: deportation requires the receiving state’s consent. According to the principles put forth regarding the admission and treatment of “aliens” in a foreign country, if Assam “expels” someone, Bangladesh is not obliged to accept them. As a result, the process tends to result in uncertain, indefinite detention or internal displacement, rather than actual removal. The 24-hour timeline does not create solutions; it merely creates a facade to show that some action is being taken. The real efficiency achieved is political efficiency: the power to declare someone an outsider without the burdens of evidence, hearing, or accountability.
A Constitutional Alternative Exists
A workable, ethical model would improve tribunals and not discard them haphazardly. It would increase staffing, improve documentation assistance, expand legal aid, and ensure that hearings are timely and fair. Additionally, it would integrate technology to streamline filings. Most crucially, it would respect the idea that citizenship disputes require more than an administrator’s signature; they require a judicial mind that applies legal standards to the evidence. Executive convenience cannot become the constitutional standard for determining who belongs.
Conclusion: A Model That Threatens the Balance of Power
Assam’s new expulsion framework changes how the Indian State understands citizenship and rights. In a process that collapses adjudication into administration and reduces due process to a deadline, the mechanism clearly grants the executive near-absolute, if not complete, control over who is labelled a “foreigner” and removed. It undermines an individual’s constitutional rights under Articles 14 and 21, short-circuits natural justice, and risks producing systemic discrimination in a region already marked by vulnerability.
However, the danger is not solely limited to Assam. Once a model of executive-driven citizenship determination is normalised in one state, the likelihood of its replication elsewhere is high. Thus, with each replication, the balance between state power and individual rights erodes further.
The author is attempting to put forth a simple argument that citizenship cannot be decided at the speed of administration. It requires the seriousness and time that can only be provided by a fair legal process. Assam’s fast-track expulsion regime is a recalibration of constitutional power; it moves India closer to a system in which citizenship is no longer adjudicated but simply declared.
Author Bio: The author is a first-year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. His academic interests include Human Rights Law and POCSO Law.
[Ed Note: This piece was edited by Tanvi Chhabra and published by Vedang Chouhan from the Student Editorial Team.]
