Barely a week after striking down the IMDT Act, the Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to the Centre by dismissing a Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed by it seeking quashing of a Delhi High Court order on deportation of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from the Capital. The Delhi High Court had on May 18 rejected the Union home ministry's plea for toning down its earlier action plan for deportation of Bangladeshis from Delhi on the grounds that the targets set therein were "unrealistic."

A Bench headed by Chief Justice R C Lahoti, who had also figured on the Bench that scrapped the IMDT Act, took no more than 30 minutes to dismiss the SLP. Referring to its observations in the order on IMDT Act that large-scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh amounted to "external aggression," the apex court directed the Union home ministry to take its revised action plan to deal with the problem back to the Delhi High Court.

The linking of the Supreme Court's observations on Bangladeshis' immigration into Assam with Delhi has thrown open relevant questions regarding implementation of the Foreigners' Act. While the IMDT judgement has left it to the Tribunals set up under the Foreigners Act in Assam to try the pending IMDT cases, the very fact that it is the Foreign Regional Registration Offices (FRRO) that retain the authority to deport foreigners from elsewhere in the country is seen as only a continuation of the "special status" for Assam in this regard.

In fact, the Group of Ministers on IMDT would have to go into the entire gamut of grey areas of the Supreme Court order, including the question of a uniform procedure for deportation of foreigners across the country. The procedure for deportation of Bangladeshis from anywhere in the country has always been different from that of other foreign nationals overstaying or entering the country without valid documents. Under the Vienna Convention of 1963, to which India is a signatory, the authorities are required to verify the nationality of the foreigner found to be staying illegally in a country. He is then issued travel documents by the consular access route and deported.

For Bangladeshis, however, the procedure followed until now is to get the local address of the suspected illegal immigrant in India and get the police authorities there to verify the same. If the claimed address is found to be incorrect, he is presumed an illegal immigrant and taken to the Indo-Bangla border and pushed back into Bangladeshi territory. Over the years, this has been objected to by the Dhaka authorities who refused to accept them as Bangladeshi citizens as well as by the Bangladeshi Rifles guarding the border.

The Supreme Court judgement asking tribunals set up in Assam under the Foreigners Act (to deport Bangladeshis who have infiltrated prior to 1971) leaves a question mark on whether letting FRROs to deal with detection/deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants in other states amounts to continuing the discrimination in dealing with Bangladeshi immigrants in Assam as against rest of the country.
The GoM, thus, would have to examine whether to set up similar tribunals to detect/deport illegal migrants from Bangladesh for the rest of the country, which is only expected to delay the whole process.

The deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants on par with other foreigners staying illegally in the country may also come up for review before the GoM. The MHA officials feel that this would only make it more difficult to send back the Bangladeshis since Dhaka would never accept them as its citizens.