1. Introduction
We are witnessing a global pattern of democratic erosion (Nord et al., Reference Nord, Altman, Angiolillo, Fernandes, Good God and Lindberg2025). This decline is typically charted through familiar markers: institutional backsliding, executive aggrandisement, weakening of checks and balances, and curtailment of civil liberties. Yet the role of ethnic, racial, and religious ideologies in constituting democratic decline is not always given sufficient emphasis. Recently, one of us has argued that this omission is a mistake (Bhat, Reference Bhat, Chan, Khosla, Liebman and Tushnet2025). Majoritarianism—defined as political projects that construct a majority and entrench its dominance over minority populations—constitutes a central mechanism of democratic erosion today. Ethnic, sectarian, religious, or racial domination systematically marginalises and excludes minoritised populations from democratic participation, fundamentally truncating the scope of democratic rule. Minority populations are instrumentalised as scapegoats, enabling majoritarian parties to mobilise resentment, consolidate their dominance, and immunise themselves against electoral displacement. Across diverse contexts, the rise and consolidation of ethnonationalist movements have unravelled long-standing commitments to democratic inclusion (Enyedi, Reference Enyedi, Croissant and Tomini2024). India stands as a particularly striking example. The ascendance of Hindu ethnonationalist majoritarianism over the last decade has constituted and aggravated a broader decline in India’s democratic health (Chatterji et al., Reference Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot2019; Ganguly et al., Reference Ganguly, Mistree, Diamond, Ganguly, Mistree and Diamond2024).
This article explores the entanglement between majoritarian domination and democratic decline by examining its legal dimension: the character of majoritarian legality. Our inquiry centres on denationalisation politics that have become paradigmatic of India’s majoritarian turn. A spectre of “illegal Bangladeshi nationals” haunts Indian political discourse, deployed to justify practices ranging from removing voters from electoral rolls (Yadav, Reference Yadav2025), abductions of those deemed to “sound” foreign (Verma et al., Reference Verma, Ripon and Qureshi2025), demolition of Muslim homes (Gurmat, Reference Gurmat2025), and illegal detentions (Trivedi, Reference Trivedi2025). While unravelling nationally, the principal site of these politics is Assam, India’s eastern state bordering Bangladesh. Assam has long been shaped by anxieties around immigration, which have hardened into hostility towards Bengali-origin minorities, both Muslims (Miyas) and Hindus, many of whom had lived in Assam for generations. Under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014, this politics has fused with national-level Hindu supremacism, assuming a more dangerous form.
The consequences are stark. Several legal policies for ostensibly verifying the citizenship status of suspected foreigners are threatening nearly four million individuals—especially Bengali-origin Miya Muslims—with denationalisation (Bhat, Reference Bhat, Foster, Neo and Sperfeldt2024a; Gogoi and Sen, Reference Gogoi and Sen2024). These denationalisation policies generate precariousness in the form of what Salah Punathil has termed “detainability” and “deportability” (Punathil, Reference Punathil2022), and what one of us has described as “irregular citizenship”: a suspension of rights associated with citizenship without any formal revocation (Bhat, Reference Bhat, Foster, Neo and Sperfeldt2024a). As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, has warned, these policies could result in “the biggest exercise in statelessness since the Second World War” (Ratcliffe, Reference Ratcliffe2019). This is now reverberating nationally, exemplifying India’s broader pattern of majoritarianism-driven democratic decline whereby legal and extra-legal measures alike reshape the demos into an ethnos (Jaffrelot, Reference Jaffrelot2021; Khosla and Vaishnav, Reference Khosla and Vaishnav2021).
While important work has examined Assam’s citizenship politics (Barbora, Reference Barbora2022; Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2023; Roy, Reference Roy2022; Sur, Reference Sur2021), less attention has been paid to the role of courts in sustaining denationalisation. Yet what is particularly striking—and demands analysis—is the role of the judiciary not merely as a complicit institution but as a driver of Assam’s denationalisation politics (Bhat, Reference Bhat2024b). As noted by scholars of democratic decline, courts may be captured or co-opted, or they may develop abusive practices that cloak authoritarianism in legality (Aguiar Aguilar, Reference Aguiar Aguilar2023; Bhat, Reference Bhat2024c; Ginsburg, Reference Ginsburg2018; Huq, Reference Huq2018; Keck, Reference Keck, Lieberman, Mettler and Roberts2022; Landau and Dixon, Reference Landau and Dixon2019). Our concern here is with a less studied mechanism: how everyday adjudicatory practices constitute majoritarian domination by shaping, obscuring, and legitimising it in different ways.
To explore this, we conducted the most extensive empirical study of Foreigners Tribunal litigation in Assam to date, analysing more than 1200 orders of Assam’s High Court (Gauhati High Court) alongside detailed case studies and interviews with lawyers defending citizenship. Our findings reveal not only a pattern of judicial doctrine that excuses and entrenches arbitrary administrative practices against minorities but also something equally salient: a consistent pattern of judicial silence. In crucial areas of administrative action, judges refrained from laying down legal norms, omitted to engage with the social context, failed to provide reasons, neglected to address legal arguments, or simply left issues unrecorded. These silences created legal vacuums that, no less than explicit doctrinal pronouncements, served to normalise, entrench, and obscure anti-minority violence.
This raises a profound theoretical question: how do granular judicial practices—both explicit legal doctrine and silences in reasoning—facilitate, normalise, and legitimise majoritarian domination? How do both what is said and what is left unsaid contribute to the subordination of minorities under conditions of democratic decline?
The first contribution of this article is to theorise majoritarian legality: to conceptualise how quotidian adjudicatory practices constitute majoritarian domination, specifically through judicial techniques that both articulate and withhold legal reasoning. Our central argument—grounded in our empirical study of court orders and informed by interviews with lawyers—is that the presence and absence of judicial reasoning together produce majoritarian power. This argument adds to a small but growing literature on insidious judicial practices such as evasion and silence in the entrenchment or legitimisation of democratic decline. Judiciary’s complicity with democratic erosion is often seen in doctrinal innovations or overt alignments with illiberal projects. Yet silence, evasion, and refusal to engage are equally potent mechanisms of judicial accommodation (Cody, Reference Cody2021; Frost and Schaaf, Reference Frost and Schaaf2024; Oder, Reference Oder2022). In India, such practices of evasion and silence—rather than explicit capture—have frequently become the dominant judicial response to majoritarian politics (Abeyratne and Karwa, Reference Abeyratne and Karwa2025; Bhatia, Reference Bhatia, Jhaveri, Khaitan and Samaratne2023). Analysing these modalities of non-discourse requires attention not only to what judges say but also to when and why they choose not to speak—when silence is acceptable, even desirable.
The second contribution is methodological. We develop the theoretical prism of legal work and judicial labour to see and interpret the dynamics of judicial reasoning and judicial silence. This approach offers a novel set of methodological tools for analysing how adjudication and lawyering constitute majoritarian legality. Our argument is that majoritarian domination is constituted both in the exercise and in the non-exercise of judicial labour of legal construction. Domination becomes embedded in law not only through explicit doctrines but also through the professional common sense of what counts as legally relevant, which claims deserve recognition, what depths of reasoning are acceptable, and what matters are considered unworthy of adjudication. In other words, both discourse and silence do the legal work of majoritarian legality.
Finally, while the behaviour of a wider set of actors—lawyers, clerks, litigants, and activists—is undoubtedly part of this story, the empirical focus of this article is necessarily narrower. Drawing primarily on our database of judicial decisions, we focus on judging to illuminate how the modalities of citizenship trials in Assam reflect and reproduce majoritarian domination. We examine two such modalities. First, through the exercise of judicial labour, judges construct minority subjects as inherently suspect, channelling legal practice towards the amplification of doubt and distrust. Second, through the non-exercise of judicial labour—through silence, evasion, and refusal to engage—judges reinforce hierarchies of belonging, rendering minority citizens invisible within the legal process. Together, these dynamics normalise graded citizenship and entrench minority subordination.
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces our theoretical conception of legal work, which frames the everyday activities of judges as central to the production of majoritarian domination. Section 3 situates this framework historically, tracing how judicial labour has long constituted majoritarian legality in Assam. Section 4 examines how everyday adjudicatory practices construct suspicion as a key modality of minority subordination. Sections 5 and 6 then shift to the non-exercise of judicial labour: Section 5 presents our empirical findings on judicial silence, while Section 6 theorises silence as the absence of interpretive labour and the reproduction of structural violence.
2. Conceptualising legal work
The core methodological contribution of this article lies in treating adjudication—and indeed lawyerly practices more generally—as forms of legal work. This framing allows us to perceive the presence and absence of such work and to analyse the different modalities it may take, even when they do not appear in conventionally recognisable forms. What makes this novel is that this emphasis on the relationship between law and work, and more specifically, on law as work is often underexplored in legal scholarship.
The Critical Legal Studies (CLS) tradition has foregrounded this connection, emphasising the labour-intensive and strategic nature of legal processes. Drawing on Marxism, Duncan Kennedy (Reference Kennedy2007) argued that legal activity is best understood as “legal work.” By this, Kennedy refers to the strategic effort “to transform an initial apprehension of what the system of norms requires, given the facts, so that a new apprehension of the system, as it applies to the case, will correspond to the extra-juristic preferences of the interpretive worker” (Kennedy, Reference Kennedy2007, p. 299). Legal work, in this sense, requires a medium. For legal workers—whether lawyers, academics, researchers, or judges—that medium consists of the institutional materials of the legal field: legislation, judicial precedents, commentaries, historical texts, and political canons, which they “fashion” in practice. The success of legal work depends on factors such as time, strategy, skill, and the “intrinsic” attributes of the rules being worked upon (Kennedy, Reference Kennedy2007, p. 300). In this article, we refer to this as the labour of legal construction—the interpretive activity through which legal workers like judges assign meaning to legal materials.
Kennedy’s account provides a productive starting point for thinking about legal work, but we wish to broaden his formulation to make it both more capacious and more granular. This is because legal construction does not exhaust the repertoire of legal work. Kennedy’s conceptualisation implicitly draws from broader traditions theorising immaterial labour—especially feminist interventions on emotional labour. Arlie Hochschild’s pioneering account defined emotional labour as the requirement “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild, Reference Hochschild1983, p. 7). Emotional labour entails “dealing with other people’s feelings, a core component of which is the regulation of emotions” (James, Reference James1989, p. 15). The distribution of such labour is deeply gendered: women disproportionately perform emotional work linked to care, but men too engage in forms of emotional labour, particularly in professional settings where the management or repression of emotions coded as “feminine”—such as fear or vulnerability—is demanded. Masculine-coded jobs, such as bill collectors or salesmen, illustrate how “emotional management strategies,” whether deployed by men or women, fall within the ambit of emotional labour. Practices such as the performative cultivation of authority, the suppression of visible emotion, or the calculated modulation of demeanour are gendered, embodied forms of immaterial work (Lewis and Gunaratnam, Reference Lewis and Gunaratnam2001; Smith, Reference Smith2008; Táíwò, Reference Táíwò2020).
This scholarship suggests that Kennedy’s formulation of legal work must be expanded beyond a lawyerly preoccupation with legal construction. Legal workers do more than interpret texts or construct doctrinal meaning. Their work has performative aspects that underpin professional authority. Judges, for example, not only interpret legal texts but also perform authority through bodily comportment, rhetorical style, or affective restraint. Lawyers similarly perform such labour when they argue cases or engage with clients. These activities are not ancillary but central to legal practice. The construction and maintenance of legal authority are not solely an exercise in practical reasoning but also a theatrical performance, undergirded by rhetoric, design, architecture, and emotional management. These are forms of immaterial legal work that must be recognised alongside legal construction.
Recognising these dimensions expands the conception of legal work beyond Kennedy’s account. It also aligns with broader theories of work and labour, particularly in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (Reference Hardt and Negri2000) account of immaterial labour as the dominant form of labour in the postmodern global economy. Hardt and Negri define immaterial labour as “labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication,” resulting in no material and durable good (Hardt and Negri, Reference Hardt and Negri2000, p. 290). Drawing inspiration from feminist theories of caring work and affective labour, they emphasise its embodied, somatic, and emotional dimensions. Although their argument is situated in the context of neoliberal globalisation, it provides a useful analytic for understanding legal work, which is simultaneously symbolic, communicative, and affective.
At the same time, as feminist critics of Hardt and Negri remind us, immaterial labour is never disembodied: it is corporeal and material (Lanoix, Reference Lanoix2013). The same is true for legal work. It not only entails symbolic legal construction but also the everyday material labours of legal practice: the production, circulation, and maintenance of documents; the embodied labour of moving through courtrooms; the physically performative management of judicial spaces; and the architectural design of courtrooms that project and constitute the majesty of law. Material and immaterial labours together constitute the domain of legal work.
Accordingly, we propose a more capacious understanding of legal work. One dimension involves the recognisable activity of legal meaning-making—what we call the judicial labour of legal construction, where judges create, shape, and craft doctrine through interpretation. A second dimension involves emotional and affective performances of authority and docility—gestures and performances, inside and outside the courtroom, that constitute and embellish legal authority. A third dimension involves the material labour embedded in legal work—the writing, filing, archiving, and physical circulation of legal documents, as well as the embodied and architectural practices that undergird legal processes.
This expanded conception is important because it reveals legal work as a generative analytic tool: a prism through which to see how law operates. It foregrounds how legal work—whether through explicit reasoning or performative authority—shapes legal worlds and political outcomes. Judicial activity is not neutral; it is strategic labour that shapes norms, transforms facts, and produces legality. Crucially, this framing avoids conflating legal work with legal construction alone and instead allows a richer appreciation of the multifaceted activities through which law operates. Judicial labours of legal construction thus constitute an important but partial dimension of legal work. This highlights how the refusal to perform judicial labour—as we show in the subsequent section—can itself be a form of legal work. Finally, this more capacious framing illuminates how legal workers shift between symbolic, affective, and material activities. For example, judges may compensate for the absence of legal reasoning—the abdication of legal construction—by heightening other performances of authority, whether in the courtroom or in extra-judicial domains, as a means of covering for the missing labour of reason.
With this broader understanding of legal work and judicial labour, we are better equipped to interpret the database of Foreigners Tribunal orders in the Gauhati High Court. Sections 3 and 4 focus on the judicial labour of legal construction in shaping the figure of the suspect subject. Sections 5 and 6 then deploy this conceptual toolkit to analyse moments where such labour is absent, illuminating how the legal work of silence reflects the withdrawal of the labour of legal construction.
3. Legally coded suspicion and majoritarianism
India’s eastern state of Assam, bordering Bangladesh, has long been the epicentre of India’s politics of denationalisation. With a population of roughly 35 million, about one-third are Bengali speakers, a similar proportion are Muslim, and around 12% belong to tribal and Indigenous communities. Since the 1960s, the so-called “foreigners’ problem” has dominated political life in the state (Baruah, Reference Baruah1999). This anxiety intensified during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, when waves of Bengali refugees fled Pakistani military violence into Assam. Among dominant Assamese groups—especially Hindu Assamese—this influx was framed as a demographic threat, and over time, anti-immigrant sentiment has frequently overlapped with prejudice against Bengali-origin minorities, particularly Miya Muslims, many of whom have lived in Assam for generations (Saikia, Reference Saikia2021).
Although Assamese sub-nationalist politics was not originally framed in religious terms, it has increasingly fused with Hindu nationalist and supremacist ideologies. Under the BJP, which came to power nationally in 2014 and later in Assam, this fusion has been consolidated. Narendra Modi’s leadership has instrumentalised Assam’s anti-immigrant discourse to mobilise the electoral base and consolidate Hindu majoritarian politics, giving a distinctly religious inflection to older Assamese anxieties. In this conjuncture, the ethnonationalist concern with foreigners merges with the illiberal-authoritarian project of Hindu supremacy, deepening suspicion and hostility towards minorities.
Politically, this convergence has produced what can be described as a pervasive culture of suspicion directed against stigmatised minorities (Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2023; Roy, Reference Roy2008). These populations live under what may be described as a shroud of suspicion, perpetually viewed as foreigners regardless of their deep roots in the region. This suspicion is not simply social prejudice but has become a structuring logic of governance.
Three processes stand out. First, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), initiated in 2013, required Assam’s 35 million residents to submit documents establishing family ties to the state. When completed in 2019, more than 1.9 million people were excluded, disproportionately Muslims (Azad et al., Reference Azad, Bhat and Mander2020). Second, India’s Election Commission has long marked voters as “doubtful” without adequate due process, forcing them to defend their citizenship. Third—and the focus of this paper—are the Foreigners Tribunals (FTs), quasi-judicial bodies constituted by executive order under the Foreigners Act (1946), and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order (1948). Assam’s Border Police refer “suspected foreigners” to these tribunals, which then give “opinions” on citizenship status. These tribunals lack independence, are staffed by executive appointees rather than judges, operate outside the ordinary court system, and have no system of appeal or review—save for narrow writ challenges before the Gauhati High Court (Bhat et al., Reference Bhat, Gupta and Gopujkar2025). Despite these profound deficiencies, they carry enormous stakes: more than 165,000 people have already been declared foreigners by the tribunals, with nearly 100,000 cases still pending.
Suspicion, in these sites, is not merely a bureaucratic tool or a diffuse affect but a generative biopolitical technique of governance. Certain populations are pre-emptively construed as threats and subjected to intensified control—not because of what they have done, but because of who they are imagined to be (Puar, Reference Puar2018). Our aim is to show how, much like in other ethnicised authoritarian contexts (Erakat, Reference Erakat2020), legal work—in the form of judicial labour—constitutes suspicion as a modality of majoritarian domination. To that end, we analyse 1193 Gauhati High Court orders between 2009 and 2019, supplemented by selected cases thereafter, along with 20 FT case files and nine in-depth interviews with defence lawyers (see “Note on Methodology” below). The fuller findings are presented elsewhere (Bhat et al., Reference Bhat, Gupta and Gopujkar2025); here we focus on aspects of the empirical material that most directly illuminate the character of majoritarian legality.
A paradigmatic, and arguably the most consequential instance of how Indian courts have entrenched suspicion through their judicial labour is the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India.Footnote 1 The case, filed by a politician associated with Assamese ethnonationalist politics (later the BJP Chief Minister of Assam and Union Minister), challenged the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT Act, 1983). The IMDT Act had placed the burden of proof on the state, providing some protection for those accused of being illegal immigrants. The petitioners claimed this undermined national security, echoing Assamese anxieties about demographic change. The Supreme Court accepted this logic wholesale. It noted that immigration was a “silent and invidious demographic invasion of Assam” by the “rapid growth of international Islamic fundamentalism,” and would turn bordering “districts into a Muslim majority region.” Immigration from Bangladesh, according to the Court, amounted to “external aggression and internal disturbance” threatening India’s sovereignty. It struck down the IMDT Act and reinstated the FTs, where the burden of proof lies on the accused. Crucially, the Court held that identifying and deporting a foreigner need not meet the procedural standards of criminal trials, carving out an exceptional domain where citizenship could be adjudicated under weakened protections (Bhat, Reference Bhat, Foster, Neo and Sperfeldt2024a).
Sonowal exemplifies how juridical labour can codify and naturalise suspicion: it translated Assamese nationalist anxieties into constitutional imperatives, crafting a legal framework that legitimated ethno-nationalist panic. It restructured the procedural terrain of citizenship adjudication in Assam by reinstating FTs—executive-controlled bodies lacking meaningful judicial safeguards—and shifting the burden of proof onto the accused. While the Assam High Court formally retained writ jurisdiction, its scope was tightly circumscribed.
The influence of Sonowal extends far beyond its doctrinal content. Assam’s High Court judges and FT members routinely invoke passages from the ruling, even when they are legally immaterial. For instance, in many ex parte decisions where foreigner status was declared without the litigant’s presence, the High Court issued unreasoned dismissals, citing Sonowal as a sufficient justification.Footnote 2 One judge, denying adjournments to a litigant seeking to present evidence, remarked that a “foreigner” could not expect the “luxury” of repeated delays.Footnote 3 In cases involving inconsistencies in documentary evidence that we theorise in the next section, judges use Sonowal as a foil to rule against defendants. In Suruj Kazi, for instance, minor inconsistencies—such as a voter roll recording “Samed Ali” instead of “Samed Kazi”—were treated as disqualifying. The judge concluded by invoking Sonowal, stressing that the “issue of large-scale migration from Bangladesh” must inform judicial assessment.Footnote 4
Yet, across these cases, Sonowal has not operated as precedent in the conventional doctrinal sense. Judges rarely engage with its reasoning in full, including the evidentiary framework it explicitly articulated. For instance, the Supreme Court had held that once a litigant leads evidence, the state is obliged, if necessary, to lead evidence in rebuttal. Yet, as Advocate Sheetal Das explained, this portion of the judgement has been wilfully ignored: state authorities typically produce no evidence at all, and both tribunal members and High Court judges fail to enforce the requirement. Instead, in subsequent invocations, tribunal members and judges selectively cite only those passages of Sonowal that encapsulate judicial anxiety about the “influx of illegal migrants.”
This selective deployment is itself important legal work. By repeating and circulating fragments of Sonowal, judges transform it into a legal meme—portable, adaptable, and endlessly reproducible across adjudicative contexts. As scholarship on legal memes shows (Balkin, Reference Balkin1998; Beckmann and Brown, Reference Beckmann and Brown2022; Gray, Reference Gray2009; Rabb, Reference Rabb2021), fragments function not only as doctrine but also as prejudicial background shaping judicial decisions and legislative agendas (Kondakov, Reference Kondakov2022). Through this iterative circulation, Sonowal comes to operate as a signal and a source of judicial common sense. It constitutes the normative universe within which citizenship adjudication proceeds, one in which minority citizens are presumptively suspect. Within this universe, defendants are construed as constant threats—imagined foreigners—structuring what claims are deemed credible, what evidence is considered worthy of attention, and what reasoning counts as persuasive. In this sense, Sonowal circulates as a dense political-affective formation: condensing suspicion, securitisation, exception, and evidentiary burden into a reusable shorthand. Detached from its original statutory context yet retaining the authority of the Supreme Court, it legitimises increasingly onerous evidentiary thresholds, rendering the minority citizen almost incapable of proving belonging.
4. Legal construction of the suspect subject
Drawing on the case database and interviews with lawyers, this section focuses on judicial labour through which suspicion is legally constructed. Suspicion here is not merely an evidentiary stance but a legal grammar—a way of interpreting and adjudicating minority identity. In Assam, judges treat Bengali Hindus and Muslims, and especially Miya Muslims, as presumptively suspect: demanding impossible documentation, fixating on minor inconsistencies, and refusing procedural accommodation. Judges thereby do not simply apply suspicion; they produce it as a constitutive modality of citizenship adjudication.
4.1. The evading subject
Judicial labour in Assam repeatedly constructs minorities as suspect subjects: “not only as someone who lies but indeed as someone who is a liar at [their] core” (Banet-Weiser, Reference Banet-Weiser2021, p. 63). Being designated as a suspect subject legitimises heightened scrutiny, surveillance, the curtailment of rights, and the deployment of exceptional forms of control. Suspicion is embedded in institutional expectations about how such individuals ought to behave, not only in trials but also even before proceedings begin. Minority subjects are expected to live in anticipation of surveillance and to conduct themselves accordingly.
This dynamic is starkest in the Gauhati High Court’s treatment of individuals declared foreigners ex parte. Between 1985 and February 2019, 63,959 people—nearly a third of all declared foreigners—were declared so without ever appearing before a tribunal (Parliament of India, Lok Sabha, 2019). There is overwhelming evidence that the Border Police routinely fails to properly serve notices or conduct preliminary inquiries as mandated (Chakravarty, Reference Chakravarty2018; Mohan, Reference Mohan2019; Sagar, 2019). Lawyers we interviewed consistently doubted the authenticity of these preliminary inquiries: they are often not conducted, and inquiry reports are fictitiously prepared.
Our analysis shows that between 2009 and 2019, 556 of the 1193 Gauhati High Court orders—almost half—were writ petitions challenging ex parte declarations. Of these, 250 (45%) were dismissed outright, upholding the tribunal’s orders; 167 (30%) were remanded for fresh adjudication; 132 (24%) merely gave petitioners “liberty to apply” before the tribunal, leaving relief to its discretion; and just one case—0.18%—was quashed on jurisdictional grounds. The pattern reveals a deeply constrained judicial approach: even where procedural violations were evident, the court showed extreme reluctance to intervene, treating redress not as a matter of legal right but of inconsistent judicial discretion.
One example is the treatment of the plea that the litigant did not personally receive notice. The High Court consistently interprets absence at the time of notice delivery as intentional evasion. The doctrine of “substituted service” exemplifies this. Legally, authorities may affix a notice to the wall of a residence if the person is absent. While common in many systems (including India), the High Court adds a crucial burden: individuals must proactively update authorities about any change of address. If the person fails to update their residence details, the court holds that affixing notice at the last known address is sufficient. This flips the burden: instead of requiring the state to locate and contact the individual—as is typical in due process frameworks—the obligation is placed on the accused to maintain lines of traceability with the investigative agency, as though they were permanently under state suspicion.
Consider the case of Rabiya Bibi,Footnote 5 a Bengali Muslim woman who challenged an FT’s ex parte order in the High Court in 2018. The notice had been served at a residence she had vacated years earlier, and it was undisputed that she had never seen the notice. Yet, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan held that her failure to inform the investigating authorities of her new address constituted an active effort to “evade” notice. Her failure to update her address was not interpreted as negligence or oversight but as deliberate evasion. In effect, the judge inferred that she had moved residence in anticipation of official proceedings that she knew were coming for her. Similarly, Morzina Begum left her marital home in 2003 due to domestic abuse and lived in the neighbouring state of Arunachal Pradesh searching for work.Footnote 6 A notice was served at her marital home, unbeknownst to her. She discovered the case only in 2015 when police came to arrest her. Instead of assessing her claim of estrangement from her marital home, Justice Bhuyan shifted the inquiry to proving her residence in Arunachal Pradesh. Despite four witnesses corroborating her stay there, her testimony was disbelieved for lack of documents. Crucially, such proof was unnecessary: the fact that she had not been at her marital home should have sufficed to show she had not received the notice. Yet the case was dismissed.
This line of questioning reveals a deeper anxiety: tracking the movements of such individuals. Although the police had not been tasked with formally tracking these movements, the judicial apparatus effectively instituted a surveillance regime by requiring individuals to prove their location and penalising failures to do so. This legal orientation is underpinned by a broader political imagination—well captured by Malini Sur’s (Reference Sur2021, p. 168) description of Bengali-origin Muslims as “elusive criminal subjects”: people presumed to have the ability to elude detection and “disappear” across India’s vast terrain as a “floating” suspect (Sur, Reference Sur2021, p. 167), constantly moving to avoid detection.
Judicial decision-making often proceeds on the presumption that this population is inherently dishonest, as illustrated in the case of Usubh Bhan Bibi.Footnote 7 She claimed to have left her house due to erosion caused by the Ganggadhar River. Yet, Justice Manojit Bhuyan questioned her credibility, citing the service report which indicated that a notice had been posted on the wall of her residence—purportedly contradicting her account. However, alternative interpretations were readily available: the house could have been partially standing, or the official could have falsified the service report. Notably, the official responsible for serving notice was not cross-examined, and the report was treated as unimpeachable evidence. The judge nevertheless concluded she was untruthful—an archetypal construction of the minority subject as inherently suspect.
Another method of service involves delivering notices to family members. But when relatives fail to inform the concerned individual, judges still construe nonappearance as evasion. In Md. Sukur Ali’s case,Footnote 8 his brother did not relay the notice. Judges refused to accept this, insisting that he should have proactively enquired, as though he knew proceedings were forthcoming. His explanation was treated as a delaying tactic. As one judge put it in a similar case: “the issue relating to the illegal Bangladeshi migrants entering India (Assam) is very much alive since last more [sic] than 30 years.”Footnote 9 In this context, citing Sonowal, he held that it was untenable for a litigant to plead ignorance based on a family member’s failure to communicate the notice.
Across these cases, judicial labour does more than adjudicate procedural disputes: it actively constructs Bengalis, and especially Miya Muslims, as evading subjects. Through doctrines of substituted service, disbelief of testimony, and dismissal of lived circumstances, suspicion becomes codified in law. Minority litigants are marked as evasive and dishonest, their claims rendered implausible in advance, and their lives judged through the prism of an enduring suspicion.
4.2. The untrustworthy subject
Another manifestation of judicial labour in constructing the suspect subject is the way courts approach evidence. Suspicion here is embedded in the very grammar of juridical truth. The FTs and the Gauhati High Court consistently privilege documents over oral testimony, demanding excessive documentation from defendants. Yet, everyday judicial practices often place insurmountable barriers on these defendants in using such documents as evidence, even when ordinary evidentiary norms would permit them. As one of us has argued elsewhere, this “documentary doublethink” (Bhat, Reference Bhat2024b) arises from the anxiety that “illegal migrants” forge documents. Courts require defendants to furnish multiple, often impossible, layers of documentation—only to systematically undermine the probative value of those very documents. This evidentiary regime places extraordinary burdens on poor and marginalised litigants, particularly women, while giving judicial imprimatur to suspicion as the structuring condition of citizenship adjudication.
The High Court’s own record in challenges to FT orders illuminates this pattern. Out of 637 writ petitions (excluding ex parte cases), 476 were dismissed outright, 45 were remanded—again leaving outcomes to the discretion of the tribunal—and only 16 were quashed. This striking imbalance reveals the judiciary’s deep reluctance to disturb FT findings, however procedurally or evidentially flawed, thereby reaffirming a structural bias against minority litigants.
Consider how judges have dealt with public documents. Under Indian evidence law, public documents enjoy a presumption of genuineness; certified copies are admissible without further proof unless rebutted. This rests on the assumption that public officials act in good faith. Yet in Assam, both the FTs and the High Court routinely discard this presumption. There is a prevailing anxiety in the public sphere that local officials conspire with Bengali litigants to help them obtain fraudulent documents (Bhat, Reference Bhat2024b). In Borhan Ali v. Union of India,Footnote 10 Justice Ujjal Bhuyan rejected a voter roll because it lacked the voter’s age and, more strikingly, because of a general suspicion that many of Assam’s voter lists were not genuine. He remarked that “it would be safer to insist for proof as it is in the public domain that a large number of voter lists have been suspected to not be genuine.” This logic did not rest on case-specific evidence but invoked a generalised atmosphere of suspicion. Justice Manojit Bhuyan similarly dismissed handwritten voter rolls due to their “deplorable condition” and inconsistent ink usage, imposing arbitrary standards that ignored the presumption of regularity.Footnote 11 In Sati Baishya v. Union of India,Footnote 12 Justice M.R. Pathak upheld the FT’s demand that certified voter rolls be compared with originals or corroborated by testimony from issuing authorities—extra-legal burdens that transform evidentiary presumptions into judicial suspicion.
Women, in particular, bear disproportionate costs of this evidentiary scepticism. Lacking alternative documentation, they often rely on Gaon Panchayat (GP) certificates to prove familial ties. In the 146 cases where GP certificates were produced in the High Court, 64% involved the citizenship of women. Although recognised by the Indian Supreme Court as public documents,Footnote 13 the Gauhati High Court has refused to apply the presumption of genuineness. Instead, it frequently requires the issuing Secretary to testify not only that they issued the certificate but also that they possess direct personal knowledge of the claimant’s family background. In our review of High Court cases, GP certificates were produced 125 times; the Secretary deposed in only 13, and nearly 73% of certificates were rejected for lack of such testimony.
Even when Secretaries did depose, judges often demanded corroboration through an official register. Justice Manojit Bhuyan, for example, rejected GP certificates in the absence of such a register—contradicting the Supreme Court’s recognition of the documents’ public character.Footnote 14 By treating GP certificates as dependent on corroboration from other public records, the High Court effectively erased their independent evidentiary status. The consequence is acute for women, whose legal identities are often anchored in such certificates: the very document designed to bridge documentary gaps is systematically delegitimised. Through these evidentiary practices, courts recast ordinary legal presumptions into extraordinary burdens. Suspicion becomes the operative principle, while compliance is structurally foreclosed.
4.3. Legally constructing gaps
The most common reason defendants lost their cases and were declared foreigners was a purported doubt over their identity, triggered by inconsistencies in documentary evidence. These inconsistencies—such as variations in names, birthdates, or addresses—are routine features of bureaucratic life in India. Yet in Assam’s citizenship trials, they become legally fatal. Crucially, these “gaps” and “discrepancies” were not merely found; they were actively constructed through judicial labour.
Legal work achieves this through various techniques. Consider a Gauhati High Court ruling on the standard of proof that defendants must meet:
In order to discharge the complete burden of proof, the nature and purport of the evidence must be such that the lineage is established not only with respect to the person whose name appears in the public documents relied upon but at the same time rules out the possibility of it being linked to any other person having a same or a similar name.Footnote 15
Here, suspicion reframes the evidentiary standard to a higher one: litigants must not only prove their claim but also disprove all imaginable alternative explanations, however implausible. It is insufficient to prove that these documents relate to them; they must also show that they cannot possibly refer to someone else. The underlying anxiety—that Bengali-origin Hindus and Miya Muslims have fraudulently obtained official documents—animates this evidentiary burden. Any inconsistency, however slight, becomes fertile ground for constructing a “gap” in evidence that unravels the entire claim because of the sheer possibility of the litigant being an impostor. In lieu of a holistic interpretation of evidence, as standard evidentiary principles would require, adjudicators in Assam have been trained—indeed, disciplined—by the juridical framework of suspicion to read for absence, inconsistency, and lack. Judicial labour in this context is animated not by a search for coherence, but by an insistence on disarticulation.
Gaps are thus not neutral absences; they are the artefacts of an interpretive orientation shaped by suspicion. “Facts must be constructed and interpreted just as laws must be,” as Kim Scheppele (Reference Scheppele1992, p. 125) reminds us. And just as “much misogynistic work is done in the construction of ‘reality’” in sexual violence cases (Scheppele, Reference Scheppele1992, p. 125), much majoritarian legal work goes into shaping the believability that underpins citizenship adjudication.
Nowhere is this more evident than in how “missing” documents are treated—not as mundane bureaucratic absences, but as signs of fraud, even when other evidence supports the claimant. This unfolds within an adjudicatory culture obsessed with documentary proof as the only legitimate evidence. Oral evidence—whether from the claimant, relatives, or even official witnesses—is viewed with deep scepticism. Tribunals are unwilling to rely solely on testimony to establish familial links.Footnote 16 Family members offering oral evidence face intense and often bewildering cross-examination, designed to probe whether the witness was “bought.” Tribunal members, as practising lawyers observed, frequently fixate on trivial or irrelevant details, obscuring the central legal questions. As Advocate Anwar Hossain noted, “Members often ask very detailed questions that are not even relevant…what does this kind of questioning eventually prove?”
Take the case of Maharjan Nessa, who challenged an FT order against her in 2019.Footnote 17 Lacking a document that listed her name alongside her father, she relied on the testimonies of her brother and uncle. Her brother affirmed that she was his sister and that they were both Ismail Sheikh’s children, whose name appeared in the 1960 voter roll. Yet Justice Manojit Bhuyan chose to focus on why her brother could not recall her date of birth, the year she first voted, or when she married. These peripheral omissions ultimately cast her claim in an unfavourable light.
This evidentiary drift towards constructing gaps with suspicion becomes even more apparent in Advocate Jahirul Alam’s account of Rahima Khatun’s case. In an attempt to establish her as Rajab Ali’s daughter, Jahirul produced a land record identifying her as such. However, the tribunal member redirected the inquiry, treating it as a civil dispute about Rajab Ali’s property ownership. Questions proliferated: How had he acquired the land? Who owned it before him? Despite Jahirul’s attempts to clarify the irrelevance of these issues, the member fixated on the supposed gaps in the land document.
To the tribunal, establishing Rajab Ali’s legal title became paramount, despite it being tangential to the core issue: whether Rahima Khatun was his daughter. This evidentiary detour echoed the popular narrative that “illegal immigrants” are “land grabbers” (Saikia, Reference Saikia2021), illicitly claiming property. The tribunal’s written order reflected this bias, focusing less on Rahima’s familial connection and more on whether the land record could quell anxieties about Rajab Ali’s ownership. One observation read: “The exhibit suffers from certain defects. Deficiencies which are: (1) The name of Rajab Ali though stood as No. 1 Patta-holder [land holder], no land has been shown mutated in his name in the opinion of the column.” Elsewhere, it concluded: “No document has been filed by the OP to prove who and how and on the basis of what she will be identified as the daughter of Rajab Ali.” Yet, as Jahirul pointed out, the opinion column in fact identified Rahima as Rajab’s daughter—a detail entirely disregarded due to the member’s preoccupation with mutation records.
While Advocate Jahirul did not speculate on the tribunal member’s motives, this preoccupation is readily intelligible within the broader juridical framework of suspicion. Lawyers such as Advocates Sudipto Sharma and Altaf Ali noted that adjudication is frequently guided by a background presumption of widespread “infiltration.” As Sharma observed: “Honestly, there is a presumption in Assam that there’s a lot of illegal migrants here… and I think this view exists across all kinds of people.”
This presumption is sharply illustrated in the case of Abdul Matali before the Assam High Court.Footnote 18 Initially served notice under the former IMDT regime in 2001, Matali’s case was reheard after the Sonowal decision, only to be declared a foreigner in 2013. His evidentiary record was, on its face, extensive. He submitted nine documents, including a 1953 passport; voter rolls from 1965, 1970, 1997, 2005, and 2009; and a certificate from the village headman. These records established the presence of his parents—Abdul Aziz Sheikh and Sara Khatun Bibi—in Assam before 1971. His father appeared in the 1953 passport and 1965 voter roll; his mother in the 1965 and 1970 rolls. Matali himself was listed in later rolls as their son. Yet, judicial labour was not directed towards evaluating the cumulative strength of this evidence but towards excavating—and producing—discrepancies. The state did not argue that Matali lacked documentation. Rather, it suggested he had fabricated a genealogy by selectively assembling names from public records. This suspicion structured the High Court’s approach, prompting an obsessive search for inconsistency. Justice B.P. Katakey seized on a minor discrepancy in Matali’s father Abdul Aziz Sheikh’s age: his 1953 passport listed his birth year as 1913, while the 1965 voter roll put him at age 40. On this basis, Katakey concluded that Abdul Aziz Sheikh and Abdul Aziz could not be the same individual, thereby nullifying Matali’s claim.
The judgement exemplifies how judicial labour, under the weight of suspicion, transforms peripheral inconsistencies into decisive flaws. A half-century-old passport, which would generally not be accorded unqualified evidentiary valueFootnote 19 (Bhat et al., Reference Bhat, Gupta and Gopujkar2025, p. 125), was elevated to the status of definitive evidence, against which all other documents were measured. Rather than assessing the coherence of the evidentiary record as a whole, the judge’s reasoning pivoted on a discrepancy of 13 years. Suspicion thus displaces principles of contextual and cumulative analysis, replacing them with a mode of adjudication governed by doubt. Crucially, these gaps are not intrinsic to the evidentiary material; they are artefacts of judicial interpretation. Within a different interpretive frame, Matali’s documents could easily have been read as broadly consistent, with minor age variations attributed to commonplace bureaucratic error. Instead, suspicion not only magnifies such discrepancies but also reconstitutes them as dispositive. Once juridified, suspicion reconfigures adjudication: it reorients judicial attention towards absence, constructing voids where evidentiary coherence might otherwise be discerned. Matali’s case thus reveals the dual function of judicial labour under a regime of suspicion: it simultaneously interprets evidence and manufactures the very deficiencies that are then deemed disqualifying. Through such labour, suspicion becomes embedded within the architecture of adjudication.
5. Judicial silence
The exercise of juridical labour is not the only legal mode of majoritarian domination. Often, it is not in elaboration but in refusal: the judicial decision not to engage, not to construct, not to explain. This is the domain of judicial silence.
5.1. Disengagement with legal claims
Judicial silence is evident in the systematic refusal to acknowledge, record, or engage with legal claims that bear significant normative weight. When judges decline even to register such claims in the legal archive, they do more than overlook procedural irregularities—they render them legally invisible, fundamentally compromising the ability of defendants to challenge them in writ petitions and appeals, as the claims are effectively removed from the legal record, allowing higher courts to deny they were ever made.
A central instance is routine judicial indifference to grave procedural lapses in citizenship adjudication. Under existing law, the Assam Border Police must conduct a meaningful inquiry before referring someone to the tribunal as a suspected foreigner. This includes affording individuals the chance to present documents and requiring prior evidence of foreign origin.Footnote 20 In practice, however, such inquiries are perfunctory or entirely absent (Sitlhou, Reference Sitlhou2022). Officers rarely visit homes, seldom allow time to gather evidence, and often fabricate inquiry reports altogether. Lawyers consistently described these inquiries as manufactured. As Advocate Altaf Ali explained, the police simply “make cases”—drawing up lists of names, securing signatures on blank sheets, and arbitrarily attributing Bangladeshi origins without ever meeting the accused: “They sit in their private chambers,” he said, “and arbitrarily pick districts in Bangladesh” to assign to individuals.Footnote 21
Interviews with lawyers confirm that FTs almost uniformly disregard objections concerning defective referrals. Tribunal members routinely refuse to entertain such arguments, often instructing lawyers to relegate them to final written submissions—where they are neither heard nor ruled upon. Objections that ought to be treated as threshold issues are thus erased at the outset. As one tribunal member bluntly told Advocate Farooq Ahmed: “The State doubted you, so clear that first.” Lawyers also report that tribunal members regularly refuse to summon investigating officers or allow meaningful cross-examination. As Advocate Ahmed remarked, “This argument is not heard. They just insist that you prove your citizenship and not worry about police mistakes.”Footnote 22 Such refusals structure proceedings in advance, shielding arbitrary state action from scrutiny.
This silence extends to the High Court. When defendants challenge tribunal decisions, their arguments regarding fraudulent or absent inquiries are frequently ignored. Advocate Sharma recalled arguing that an inquiry report had been forged, as no investigation had actually taken place. But the judgement made no mention of this allegation, excising it from the judicial record altogether. Out of 1193 High Court orders we studied, concerns about investigative malpractice appeared in only 20 cases—a striking empirical confirmation of lawyers’ testimony that such objections are routinely raised but almost never acknowledged.
Concrete examples illustrate this judicial posture. In Isha Hoque’s case,Footnote 23 the defendant in the High Court argued that the Referral Authority (Police Superintendent) had disregarded the inquiry officer’s finding that she was, in fact, a citizen and still referred the matter to the tribunal. Justice Manojit Bhuyan did not engage with this argument. Instead, he dismissed the petition for failing to bring any evidence to establish the Referral Authority’s failure of due diligence. This reasoning sidestepped the central issue: the Referral Authority’s duty to apply its mind involved his decision—contrary to an official finding of citizenship in the inquiry report—to be clearly justified based on material. Justice Bhuyan, however, shifted the burden onto the accused rather than requiring the state to provide an explanation. Similarly, in Md. Jalaluddin’s case,Footnote 24 the Referral Authority again ignored the inquiry officer’s conclusion of citizenship. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan merely remanded the matter, directing that the Referral Authority should supply brief reasons to justify the referral. Yet a remand was inadequate: the Referral Authority had no evidentiary basis for its reference, and its failure to apply its mind was not curable. Sending the case back prolonged proceedings while insulating the Referral Authority from accountability.
In Sulema Khatun’s case,Footnote 25 Justice B.K. Sharma noted defence submissions alleging that the inquiry officer had falsified his report. But he dismissed the writ petition on unrelated grounds, without engaging with the allegation at all. Likewise, in Usharani Biswas’s case,Footnote 26 the defence argued that the inquiry officer had failed to seek her version during the inquiry. Justice Bhuyan remanded the case to the tribunal without directing any examination of this critical lapse. Such dismissals reveal a deeper pattern: not merely reluctance, but an institutionalised mode of silencing. Judges decline to record or respond to arguments that strike at the heart of procedural legitimacy. Unlike permissive doctrinal constructions discussed in previous sections, here the mode is erasure—judges proceed as if such arguments were never raised.
This erasure is particularly stark in ex parte cases, where litigants are frequently failed by systems of communication, representation, and access. Between 2009 and 2019, of 556 writ petitions challenging ex parte orders, nearly half (250) were dismissed. In many such cases, the High Court refused to consider the merits, invoking the spectre of “floodgates.” Fatema Khatun, for example, challenged her ex parte order on the ground that her lawyer had misled her, ignoring her calls and visits.Footnote 27 Justice B.K. Sharma dismissed her plea with a sweeping generalisation: “In most ex parte orders, the suspected foreigners take the plea of improper guidance by the advocate.” Her account was not considered on its own terms but collapsed into a stock narrative of evasion. Paradoxically, her grievance was disqualified not in spite of its prevalence, but because of it. The court asked no questions—about the timing of notice, her distance from the tribunal, her lawyer’s record, or her socioeconomic circumstances—that could have substantiated her claim. The dismissal, like in many other cases, was based solely on the grounds of judicial economy: “If…it were to be accepted, it will be difficult to dispose off the large number of references pending in tribunals.”Footnote 28
Here, dismissal was not a finding on the merits but a refusal to see. As with many others, Khatun’s specificity was erased by its reduction to a stereotype. Similarly, Jiban Uddin Ahmed’s claim that he had been unaware of the next steps in his proceedings was dismissed with the remark: “If this excuse is allowed, all the foreign nationals, whose presence in Assam is in huge numbers, would take the same plea.”Footnote 29 Such reasoning collapses individual accounts into a collective trope of untrustworthiness—one already mapped onto Miya Muslims as a suspect class. These responses do more than dismiss individual claims—they signal a broader judicial posture that treats the collective experience of vulnerable minorities as routine and irrelevant.
This is the modality of silence: the active withdrawal of judicial labour. Judges have crafted a procedural architecture in which challenges to flawed inquiries simply cannot be heard. Silence, here, is not absence but technique. We theorise this silence through an interpretive approach (Putnam and Banghart, Reference Putnam, Banghart, Scott and Barker2017) that centres the perspectives of participants in the legal field. Silence becomes visible when it departs from the shared expectations of legal practice—for instance, when judges fail to do what lawyers, socialised into the normative universe of Indian law, understand as the ordinary work of adjudication. In our interviews, lawyers repeatedly emphasised this point: they described the court’s refusal to engage with threshold claims—about forged inquiry reports, procedural lapses, or failures to apply the mind—as anomalous and troubling precisely because such omissions contravene the basic norms of adjudication. In ordinary non-citizenship cases in Assam and outside, jurisdictional objections are acknowledged, even if they may be ultimately rejected with reasons. Here, by contrast, silence displaces recognition altogether. These omissions are not neutral gaps but carry deep normative significance: the presence or absence of judicial reasoning directly shapes procedural legitimacy, precedent, and the capacity of defendants to assert rights.
Attending to these interpretive cues allows us to discern silence as a structured modality of majoritarian legality: through what is left unsaid as much as through what is written, courts reproduce hierarchies of belonging, render minority litigants invisible, and institutionalise structural marginalisation. Silence, in this sense, is both descriptive and normative: it is detectable because it violates the expectations of those immersed in law’s practice, and it is consequential because it actively reshapes the legal universe in which citizenship is adjudicated.
5.2. Disengagement with the context
Another stark manifestation of judicial abdication is the systematic refusal to engage with the specific facts and lived realities of litigants. Adjudication becomes abstracted, with legal standards and burdens assessed independently of the socio-economic or procedural context in which litigants operate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ex parte proceedings, where the threshold of “sufficient cause” for non-appearance requires—at least in principle—a context-sensitive inquiry.
Indian jurisprudence has long acknowledged that poor, unrepresented, or legally inexperienced litigants should be assessed under more generous thresholds.Footnote 30 Yet, in Gauhati High Court’s citizenship adjudication, this context-sensitive logic is abandoned. Instead, judgements pivot to a reductive question: not whether the litigant’s non-appearance was reasonable given their circumstances, but whether they could have done more to appear. This abstract posture burdens litigants disproportionately, demanding initiative and legal literacy they may not possess.
Of the 68 writ petitions in our dataset citing inadequate legal representation, 43 were dismissed. Advocate Bhuyan attributes the prevalence of ex parte orders to lawyers misleading, misinforming, or abandoning their clients—yet the High Court has routinely faulted petitioners themselves. As one judgement put it: “Merely by blaming his counsel would not absolve the petitioner.”Footnote 31 Judicial reasoning proceeds as though litigants and their lawyers operate as equals, erasing power differentials and structural constraints.
The case of Abdul Hamid illustrates the stakes of such reasoning.Footnote 32 Declared a foreigner without his knowledge in 2000 after relying on a lawyer who told him his presence was unnecessary, Hamid only learned of the decision in 2016. Still, the High Court dismissed his petition, reasoning that he had failed to follow up with counsel. The implication was stark: had Hamid simply “done more,” he could have avoided being branded a foreigner. But the judgement offered no engagement with the factual particularities of Hamid’s situation. Could he realistically have contacted his lawyer? Did his lawyer have a functioning office or phone number? Was Hamid in a position—socially, economically, or informationally—to question his lawyer’s advice or pursue the matter independently? These questions were neither asked nor answered. The judgement neither explored whether Hamid had the means or knowledge to do so nor asked what “following up” would entail for someone in his position.
Other cases reveal the same logic. Jyotsna Nath missed her tribunal hearings while recovering from a stroke. When she challenged the ex parte order, Justice Bhuyan ruled that she should have pursued her case through family members.Footnote 33 In Pinki Das’s case,Footnote 34 Justice A.K. Goswami refused to accept that she could have missed hearings because she was in labour during the tribunal hearings. The judgements are silent on essential factual matters. Would a woman in late pregnancy reasonably prioritise legal proceedings over the health and safety of herself and her child? Was Jyotsna Nath, recovering from a stroke, in any position to actively follow up with her counsel or track tribunal proceedings?
The result is a judicial posture that disavows interpretive responsibility while reinforcing abstract, rigid expectations. As seen throughout this section, adjudication becomes an exercise in blame rather than inquiry—fixated on what litigants failed to do, not what they could reasonably have done. The specificity of individual claims is flattened; context is rendered irrelevant. These silences are not incidental but symptomatic of a deeper systemic tendency: the refusal to construct legal doctrine that meaningfully engages with lived realities. In place of context-sensitive judgement, courts impose homogenised burdens, unmoored from litigants’ actual capacities.
5.3. Absent legal standards
This judicial refusal to engage with context has another consequence: the erosion—or outright absence—of legal standards. Without context-sensitive interpretation across cases, doctrinal development is stunted. Standards such as “sufficient cause” are deployed in name but remain ill-defined, inconsistently applied, and doctrinally hollow.
As noted earlier, the sufficient cause standard in ex parte challenges is meant to assess whether a litigant’s absence was reasonable in their circumstances. But the High Court has neither articulated what this reasonableness entails nor developed a framework for evaluating it. The result is a floating threshold—vague, exacting, and resistant to meaningful application.
This doctrinal gap is apparent in cases involving inadequate legal representation. The High Court has consistently rejected such claims without legally defining when counsel’s failure may amount to “sufficient cause.” Instead, judgements have vaguely implied that litigants could—and should—have done more, without clarifying what that “more” entails or acknowledging the practical barriers faced by poor, marginalised, or ill-informed clients. In Kutub Uddin’s case, he was faulted for failing to file a written submission himself.Footnote 35 Amina Bibi was told she ought to have independently monitored her case.Footnote 36 Bhanu Biswas was criticised for not adducing documentary evidence without legal assistance.Footnote 37 No consideration is given to whether these expectations are viable, nor is there an articulation of what would count as a sufficient cause. The standard becomes impossible to meet because it is impossible to know. The standard, in its current judicial form, functions less as a test and more as a tool of dismissal.
Also revealing is the pattern of allowing petitions “in the interest of justice” without reasoned orders. Of 168 writs successful against ex parte orders, 68—roughly 40%—were allowed solely on this ostensible ground. This phrase, while rhetorically powerful, is not constructed as a legal standard. It carries no objective criteria, no doctrinal framework, and no guidance for future adjudication. It functions as a discursive placeholder rather than a substantive legal rationale. The judgements invoking this phrase routinely lacked any reasoning: they do not specify why justice required intervention in the specific case, nor do they offer any principles that might inform similar cases. This judicial tendency to oscillate between impossible thresholds and unreasoned benevolence erodes the very foundation of legal decision-making.
The absence of standards extends beyond ex parte orders. In cases involving documentary evidence, the High Court has imposed contradictory requirements for authentication. In some rulings, issuing officials must have personal knowledge of the document’s contents;Footnote 38 in others, they must produce contemporaneous records.Footnote 39 These divergent demands are not rooted in a considered interpretation of evidentiary law but reflect ad hoc improvisation.
This superficial engagement with legal reasoning results in fractured doctrine. Without the discipline of consistent standards, adjudication becomes unpredictable, inaccessible, and resistant to accountability. Litigants are left in a doctrinal fog, unsure of what the law demands or how to satisfy it. Worse still, the absence of standards provides cover for discretionary exclusions, permitting judges to reach outcomes untethered to principle or precedent.
6. Interpretive labour and structural violence
What does this systematic judicial non-engagement reveal about how majoritarian domination becomes embedded in legal practices? Legal scholarship, like much of academic inquiry more generally, tends to gravitate towards “areas of [discursive] density” (Graeber, Reference Graeber2015, p. 63). Yet discursive absence is no less critical in constituting power. Judicial silence, we argue, is not mere passivity or failure to act. It is an active, constitutive practice of governance.
Feminist theorisation of interpretive labour offers a conceptual key. Drawing on this tradition, Graeber describes interpretive labour as “the continual work of imaginative identification”—the work of deciphering the motives, feelings, and perspectives of others in order to sustain social relationships (Graeber Reference Graeber2015, p. 63). Maintaining “human relations,” Graeber writes, “requires a constant and often subtle work of…endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view.” Ellie Anderson approaches this through “hermeneutic labour,” which involves “the ability to imaginatively adopt the perspectives of others” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2023, p. 179). Interpretive labour involves “patient, deliberative reflection” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2023, p. 180) on others’ perspectives, emotions, and desires, extending beyond the moment of interaction into continuous self-reflection and planning.
It is not difficult to see how interpretive labour is paradigmatic to our practices of legal adjudication. The reflective, deliberative, and almost programmatic nature of interpretive labour defines decision-making practices—such as those that lawyers and judges often recognise and describe as their own—that involve practical reasoning. Legal adjudication demands an intellectual and social investment—one that requires understanding, interpreting, stepping back from, and critically assessing social relationships—at least in the familiar lawyerly account and in its aspiration.
Take the legal standard of reasonableness, ubiquitous in common law and constitutional adjudication. Its application requires judges to engage in a complex exercise of imaginative identification. As John Gardner explains, judges must construct an imaginary person—the reasonable person—with a distinct character, temperament, and disposition (Gardner, Reference Gardner and LaFollette2019). They must consider this figure’s established patterns of action and assess how such a person would respond to novel circumstances to determine “the reasonable thing to do.” This process demands that judges imaginatively inhabit another’s standpoint, situated within a social world, and evaluate conduct through that lens. It also invites a reflexive dimension: would I, as a reasonable person, have acted similarly? In aligning this fictive persona with shared social norms, judges perform precisely what Graeber calls the “work of imaginative identification”—the interpretive labour central to legal judgement (Graeber, Reference Graeber2015).
Or consider the role of empathy in adjudication. “Excellent judging,” as Robin West argues, “requires empathic excellence” (West, Reference West2013, p. 247). Empathy becomes a judicial ideal not merely as a moral virtue, but as a condition of sound legal reasoning. Judges must do more than grasp legal doctrine—they must understand “desire, and need, and frustration: what is the basis of the need, or desire, to marry, to have one’s intimate relations sanctified by the state as well as by religious authority? How does it feel to be denied something important because of an “immutable characteristic?” One must likewise know something about the subjective feel of promising, and of warranting, and of diagnosing, and of discriminating” (West, Reference West2013, pp. 246–7). The interpretive labour of adjudication—imaginative identification, empathetic understanding, principled justification—is thus constitutive of its very form (Bandes, Reference Bandes2009; Colby, Reference Colby2011). Without it, adjudication loses not just its texture, but its legitimacy.
Yet in our study of Assam’s citizenship trials, judges consistently refuse to exercise interpretive labour in relation to minority citizens facing citizenship dispossession. Given the centrality of interpretive labour to judicial labour, what, then, does the absence of such labour in specific legal sites tell us? From a legal standpoint, systematic silence—unrecorded arguments, unreasoned orders, missing and under-defined legal standards—produces legal vacuums that license administrative arbitrariness and disempower minority litigants. We suggest there is more at stake here.
Feminist scholarship, long attuned to the uneven distribution of emotional, affective, and hermeneutic labour, offers instructive insights here. Anderson (Reference Anderson2023), for instance, examines how intimate male–female relationships are structured by a profound asymmetry in interpretive work. “Women are taught that these activities are their job,” she writes, “but men are taught that they are not; thus, women in relationships with men shoulder the burden of hermeneutic labour” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2023, p. 180). This unequal distribution of interpretive effort—essential to sustaining the conditions of intimacy—operates as a mechanism of exploitation within heteropatriarchal capitalist societies. Men enjoy the emotional rewards of intimacy; women absorb the costs, including compromised well-being. Beneath this dynamic lies a deeper structure: a hierarchy of experience, value, and ultimately, social status. Crucially, Anderson argues that this hermeneutic asymmetry is not a by-product but a form of misogyny—a structural mechanism that secures male dominance through the routine devaluation of women’s interpretive work. The unequal burden of sense-making is not incidental; it is the shape that hierarchy assumes.
This insight, we suggest, is equally vital for understanding how interpretive labour is distributed—and withheld—within legal institutions. The absence of such labour in the judicial reasoning we examine reveals a parallel hierarchy: between the state’s powerholders and the minority subjects they judge. Here, the refusal to engage in hermeneutic labour becomes a mode of domination. Through this strategic non-performance, the minority subject is not merely misunderstood but actively constructed as suspicious—legally visible only as a threat and otherwise rendered invisible, even dehumanised.
This disparate exercise of interpretive labour characterises other racialised legal contexts as well. Reva Siegel’s (Reference Siegel2013) analysis of contemporary equal protection jurisprudence in the United States vividly illustrates how uneven interpretive labour sustains legal hierarchies. Siegel shows that the US Supreme Court treats the legal recognition of majority and minority experiences asymmetrically. In racial discrimination cases brought by minority plaintiffs, the Court demands proof of a conscious discriminatory purpose, effectively rendering their lived experiences of structural exclusion irrelevant without nearly unattainable evidence. By contrast, in challenges to affirmative action brought by white plaintiffs, no such evidentiary burden is imposed. This doctrinal asymmetry, Siegel argues, has profound consequences: it renders minority experiences of racial subordination legally invisible, while amplifying and constitutionally safeguarding majority grievances. As Siegel puts it, “one branch of equal protection ignores citizens’ experience of law and the other is deeply concerned about it” (Siegel, Reference Siegel2013, p. 4). Her analysis thus exposes a selective deployment of interpretive labour—one that centres and legitimates the experiences of the majority, while systematically withholding interpretive effort from those who suffer structural harm.
This asymmetry in interpretive labour is not incidental; it is constitutive of hierarchy, embedding graded citizenship into the very architecture of constitutional law. In contexts of deep inequality, as David Graeber argues, the burden of interpretation—what he calls imaginative identification—is distributed unevenly. Structural violence, he writes, “creates lopsided structures of the imagination,” wherein the marginalised must exert significant effort to understand the perspectives, desires, and emotions of those above them (Graeber, Reference Graeber2015, p. 89). The powerful, by contrast—shielded by the threat of force or the inertia of structural dominance—are able to forgo such labour altogether. “Those relying on the fear of force,” Graeber observes, “are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labour, and thus, generally speaking, they do not” (Graeber, Reference Graeber2015, p. 73). Where mutual understanding, persuasion, and shared norms might otherwise guide social and legal relations, domination and coercion take their place.
This framework sharpens our understanding of judicial silence—of what it means when judges withhold the interpretive labour that underpins the democratic legitimacy of legal authority. Silence may sometimes be strategic, at other times a product of resource constraints, or some combination of the two. Our methodological focus—court orders—cannot fully disaggregate these possibilities. But approaching the problem through the prism of interpretive labour enables us to move beyond a simple binary between strategic calculation and innocent omission. Even what judges perceive as the right or appropriate allocation of resources—of time, energy, or attention—is itself political. What matters, then, is not only whether silence is carefully cultivated to conceal or evade but also how its systematic recurrence signals a deeper absorption into the professional habitus of FT members and High Court judges. From 2009 to 2019, across all levels of adjudication, lawyers’ claims were regularly ignored, unrecorded, or left without a reasoned response. This pattern suggests the embedding of silence into the “common sense” of adjudication, where non-engagement becomes the routine mode of governing minority citizenship.
This refusal to engage with facts, articulate legal standards, or explain its reasoning is a modality of domination. When High Court judges, for instance, avoid defining “sufficient cause” under citizenship law or fail to clarify how a legal standard applies to a particular case, they signal that certain subjects—especially Muslims accused of being “illegal immigrants”—are unworthy of the labour of recognition and reason. In such moments, the absence of interpretation becomes a legal act in itself: it denies the minority subject not only substantive rights but also the epistemic dignity of being seen, heard, and reasoned with. The state’s refusal to interpret is thus an assertion of power; it casts the minority subject outside the community of legal meaning, beyond the mutual obligations that law, at its best, is meant to instantiate.
Judicial non-reasoning, in this light, must be understood not simply as negligence or incompetence, but as a structural practice that entrenches hierarchy. It is a form of what Anderson identifies as misogyny—and what, in this context, we might call legal subordination: the production of an inferiorised subject through the very refusal to engage, interpret, or recognise.
7. Conclusion
This article has examined how routine judicial techniques—often coded as neutral, technical, or banal—become instruments of majoritarian domination. Through a close analysis of two interlocking modalities in Assam—the juridification of suspicion and the systemic deployment of silence—we have shown how Indian courts participate in the legal unmaking of minority citizenship.
The first modality, suspicion, is not simply an evidentiary posture but a legal grammar through which Bengali, and especially Miya Muslim identity, is adjudicated in Assam. It is enacted through a repertoire of forensic scrutiny: demanding impossible documentation, fixating on minor inconsistencies, and insisting on evidentiary precision from those structurally denied it. As Didier Fassin notes in the French asylum context—where “the claimant is usually treated as suspicious before proved sincere” (Fassin, Reference Fassin2013, p. 54)—this posture inverts the presumption of innocence and recasts adjudication as lie detection, “at times verging on public cruelty.” In Sonowal, suspicion is constitutionalised, transforming from a procedural stance into a principle of governance, uncritically replicated across hundreds of cases. Its iterative circulation, as our discussion of legal memes shows, converts fragments of Sonowal into portable, affective legal artefacts that entrench suspicion as common sense. Suspicion thus emerges not only as a doctrine but also as a modality of governance, structuring how claims are heard, whose testimony is believed, and which litigants are rendered permanently suspect.
The second modality, silence, operates not as absence but as a technique—the active withdrawal of judicial labour. Judges routinely refuse to record arguments, decline to define standards, and leave claims without reasoned response. This non-performance of interpretive labour produces incoherence, licenses arbitrariness, and normalises hierarchy under the cover of legality. Silence here is not the breakdown of law, but its reconfiguration. As our theorisation shows, it cannot be reduced to strategic concealment or mere omission; rather, it becomes engrained in legal common sense. Silence communicates, constitutes, and signals hierarchy, designating some litigants—especially Muslims accused of being “illegal immigrants”—as unworthy of the labour of interpretation. This insight expands our understanding of adjudication in authoritarian settings: courts contribute not only through doctrinal rulings or overtly discriminatory reasoning but equally through acts of evasion, omission, and non-engagement. Silence, read interpretively, is thus a modality of domination: it defines which subjects are visible to law and which are excluded from its normative community.
Together, suspicion and silence reveal how judicial activity must be understood both in institutional terms and in the dispersed practices that cumulatively produce domination. They illuminate majoritarian legality not as the product of individual bias or ideology but as a decentralised formation embedded in legal technique, professional norms, and institutional expectations. They shape what judges recognise as “doing law”: which forms of scrutiny are legitimate, which claims require reasons, and which silences are permissible. This perspective makes an important contribution to the study of democratic erosion and authoritarianism: it shows how these processes are embedded in everyday adjudication, sedimented through the banal routines of courts.
In theorising these modalities, we also recast the concept of legal work. Legal work is not confined to doctrinal elaboration but includes performances of procedural propriety, rhetorical invocations of neutrality, and even acts of silence. These gestures do not always produce law; they often substitute for it. Our analysis demonstrates how doctrinal elaboration and judicial silence operate dialectically—one through the constitutionalisation of suspicion, the other through the non-recognition of minority claims. Together, they constitute a legal order in which domination is routinised, and dispossession is cloaked in legality. Such practices facilitate legal actors to engage in what we may call legal gaslighting (Cheung, Reference Cheung2021; Velte, Reference Velte2024): practices that dehumanise minority subjects while maintaining law’s presence as a mode of governance that claims legitimacy.
Understanding these practices as cumulative legal work reveals how the authority of law is sustained even amid incoherence and harm. Judicial technique becomes the site where majoritarian power is enacted—not through spectacle, but through repetition, formalism, and routinised disavowal. In Assam, this perspective illuminates how judges unmake citizenship not only through what they adjudicate but also through what they render invisible: claims they decline to see, litigants they refuse to hear, and harms they will not name. Democratic erosion here is neither sudden nor centralised; it is dispersed, embedded in legal common sense, and carried forward by the very habits that purport to uphold the rule of law.
This article thus makes three contributions. Empirically, it shifts focus from the FTs—rightly critiqued for arbitrariness and executive control (Bhat, Reference Bhat2024b; Rahman, Reference Rahman2020; Sabhapandit and Baruah, Reference Sabhapandit and Baruah2021; Yesmin, Reference Yesmin2024)—to the Assam High Court, showing how professional legal culture itself enables denationalisation. Theoretically, it develops suspicion and silence as modalities of adjudication that reveal how courts contribute to authoritarian legality not only through what is said but also through what is unsaid. Methodologically, it redefines legal work to encompass doctrinal elaboration, silence, and legal memes, thereby opening new avenues for studying the dispersed, affective, and often evasive practices through which domination is juridically sustained.
What emerges is a framework for understanding authoritarian legality as a form of legal culture: messy, decentralised, and embedded in routine judicial practice. By tracing suspicion, silence, and legal memes, we show how courts normalise exclusion while preserving the appearance of legality. This analysis extends beyond Assam, offering tools for global scholarship on migration, citizenship, and authoritarianism to examine how legal technique becomes a medium of domination, legitimising exclusion through the very practices that claim to safeguard law.
8. Note on methodology
For the Gauhati High Court database (2009–2019), cases were first collected by Daksh through automated scraping of the High Court’s website. From an initial 1536 orders, non-relevant cases (e.g. convictions under the Foreigners Act, passport registration matters, and other petitions unrelated to tribunal opinions) were excluded. A total of 1193 orders were then coded by case type, outcome, judge, and litigant demographics, focusing on ex parte declarations and contested petitions. After coding, we prepared summaries of orders to track judicial trends. The dataset is based on publicly available records, but its completeness cannot be guaranteed, as it depends on what was accessible on the court’s website. The qualitative material draws on 20 case files from Tribunal proceedings and nine in-depth interviews with defence lawyers, conducted remotely between August 2020 and August 2021 with informed consent. These case studies and interviews were collected through the network of lawyers associated with the Parichay Legal Aid Clinic, with which the authors are affiliated. The 20 case studies span ten districts of Assam, and the nine interviewed lawyers—each representing defendants in one of the selected cases—come from nine different districts across the state. All interviews were transcribed, anonymised, and securely stored.
Acknowledgements
This article forms part of a larger research project supported by the Parichay Legal Aid Clinic, National Law School of India University, and Queen Mary University of London. We thank the researchers associated with these institutions and networks for their contributions to data collection, with special thanks to Shardul Gopujkar, Anup Surendranath, Darshana Mitra, Rupali Samuel, Ashish Yadav, Leah Varghese, and other colleagues at Daksh. Fieldwork was funded by the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School, and we are grateful to Michelle Foster, Jeff Redding, Christoph Sperfeldt, and Adil Hasan Khan for their support. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Law and Society Association conference (Chicago, May 2025), the special colloquium marking the 75th anniversary of the Indian Constitution at the South Asian Studies Council, Yale University (New Haven, September 2025), Socio Legal Studies Association Conference 2014 (Liverpool, April 2025), and a pre-publication workshop for this special issue (December 2024). We thank the participants and convenors of these workshops. We are especially grateful to Roger Cotterrell, Rick Abel, Salah Punathil, Gokulnath Govindan, Padmini Baruah, Pratiksha Baxi, Julia Eckert, Rohit De, Sushant Singh, Lubhyathi Rangarajan, Sandhya Fuchs, Radhika Govindrajan, and Fariya Yesmin for their detailed feedback.
Cases
G.P. Srivastava v. R.K. Raizada (2000) 3 SCC 54.
Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India (2005) 5 SCC 665.
Sarbananda Sonowal (II) v. Union of India (2007) 1 SCC 174.
State of Assam & Anr. v. Moslem Mandal & Ors, (2013) 3 GLR 402.
Jiban Uddin Ahmed v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3231 of 2011, Gauhati High Court, 20 March 2012.
Abdul Matali v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1291 of 2013, Gauhati High Court, 6 May 2013.
Ismail Ali v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1143 of 2014, Gauhati High Court, 25 June 2014.
Sulema Khatun v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1691 of 2015, Gauhati High Court, 29 April 2015.
Sabed Ali v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7099 of 2013, Gauhati High Court, 26 June 2015.
Rukia Begum v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 2678 of 2013, Gauhati High Court, 15 July 2015.
Md. Sukur Ali v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3163 of 2010, Gauhati High Court, 24 August 2015.
Bhanu Biswas v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1663 of 2012, Gauhati High Court, 22 September 2015.
Fatema Khatun v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6030 of 2015, Gauhati High Court, 11 December 2015.
Morzina Begum v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7372 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 8 December 2016.
Borhan Ali v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7669 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 6 August 2016.
Kutub Uddin v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7169 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 29 November 2016.
Md. Chabu Ali v. Union of India Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3602 of 2010, Gauhati High Court, 30 November 2016.
Md. Abdul Hamid v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7475 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 15 December 2016.
Sorhab Ali v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1991 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 24 July 2017.
Md. Jalaluddin v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 2528 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 11 August 2017.
Jyotsna Nath v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5912 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 9 March 2018.
Md. Syed Ali v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6774 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 16 May 2018.
Ismail Khalifa v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3458 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 15 June 2018.
Romila Khatun v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3807 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 6 August 2018.
Pinki Das v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5359 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 13 August 2018.
Amiran v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5504 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 16 August 2018.
Amina Bibi v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5672 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 24 August 2018.
Rabiya Bibi v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6330 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 15 September 2018.
Isha Hoque v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6472 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 21 September 2018.
Jaygan Nessa v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5460 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 24 September 2018.
Usubh Bhan Bibi v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 5323 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 25 September 2018.
Sona Bhanu Begum v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6589 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 9 November 2018.
Musstt Joynab Bibi and Ors. v. Union of India, WP(C) 7035/2016, Gauhati High Court, 15 November 2018.
Jyotsna Das v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6638 of 2018, Gauhati High Court, 26 November 2018.
Suruj Kazi v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7448 of 2013, Gauhati High Court, 30 November 2018.
Rupajan Begum v. Union of India (2018) 1 SCC 579.
Hazara Khatoon v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7317 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 22 January 2019.
Abdul Barek v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1478 of 2017, Gauhati High Court, 2 April 2019.
Anowara Bewa v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 905 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 17 May 2019.
Sankar Das v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3362 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 10 June 2019.
Seeta Das v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3566 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 17 June 2019.
Maharjan Nessa v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 3741 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 25 June 2019.
Asthami Das v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 4161 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 9 August 2019.
Hasina Begum v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 6752 of 2016, Gauhati High Court, 27 August 2019.
Usharani Biswas v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) 4869 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 9 September 2019.
Rahima Khatun v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 4892 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 11 September 2019.
Rukiya Khatun v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 4049 of 2020, Gauhati High Court, 12 October 2020.
Haider Ali v. Union of India & Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1818 of 2019, Gauhati High Court, 30 March 2021.
Md. Sujab Ali v. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition (Civil) No. 2221 of 2020, Gauhati High Court, 20 August 2021.
Karim Ali v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 7361 of 2017, Gauhati High Court, 16 June 2022.
Smt. Sati Baishya @ Sati Mitra @ Saraswati Baishya v. Union of India, WP(C) 8585/2018, Gauhati High Court, 20 September 2024.
Md. Rahim Ali @ Abdur Rahim v. State of Assam (2024) 7 SCR 2329.
Statutes
The Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964.
The Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983.
Open access
