A 45-year-old woman was sent to a detention camp in eastern Assam’s Jorhat on Wednesday after being declared a non-citizen by a Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT).
Members of her family said the tribunal rejected Dolly Roy’s papers linking her to the 1951 National Register of Citizens as she had failed to turn up for three hearings before she was summoned to a Jorhat FT on Tuesday. The tribunal also rejected the medical certificates that she produced to claim she could not attend the hearings because of illness, her son Sagar Roy said.
Ms Roy’s lawyer Debabrata Pal said a bail application would be moved for her release from the detention centre, where she was sent after an ex-parte judgement.
“She is from Golaghat. Her case began in 2010, but she failed to turn up for hearings there following which it was transferred to a Jorhat FT,” Mr. Pal said.
Meanwhile, a 70-year-old man named Sona Munda, who had been in the Goalpara detention centre since 2014, died of cancer at a Guwahati hospital.
“He was sent to the hospital when he was in the last stages of the disease. But his case is more intriguing because he was an Adivasi who came from central India and could in no way have been a foreigner unless he was deliberately made one,” a member of the All-Assam Adivasi Students’ Association said.
