Cases filed under laws governing people living in India illegally have been declining even as those pertaining to unlawful exits from the country have been on the rise, according to data for 2018 released by the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) on Wednesday.
To be sure, this does not reflect on whether or not illegal immigration into India — a controversial subject right now — has increased or decreased.
In 2018, only seven cases were filed under The Citizenship Act, which penalises furnishing false documents or making false claims to avail Indian citizenship. The data also shows that the number of cases against illegal immigrants and foreigners pretending to be Indian citizens declined between 2016 and 2018.
The 2018 edition of Crime in India statistics, released this week by NCRB, which works under MHA, shows that there were 2,712 such cases in 2016, which reduced to 1,956 in 2017 (a fall of 12%) and further to 1,724 (a fall of 28% from 2017) in 2018. These cases were filed under three special laws: The Registration of Foreigners & The Foreigners Act, The Passport Act, and The Citizenship Act. Of these 1,724 cases, 1,191 were filed under the foreigners acts, 526 under The Passport Act, and seven under The Citizenship Act.
Commenting on the citizenship law, Supreme Court advocate Sriram Parakkat said, “The intent and object of the Act is only to provide for acquisition and determination of Indian citizenship. Section 17 of the act provides that a person who makes a false representation in order to acquire citizenship can be punished under the Act. But the object of the act is to enable procurement of Indian citizenship.”
In contrast, an exercise such as National Register of Citizens (NRC) is primarily aimed at detecting whether people have the required documentation to establish their Indian citizenship.
Interestingly, the number of cases under the Emigration Act, which deals with Indians going out of the country, has increased continuously during this period – from 101 in 2016 to 127 in 2017 to 254 in 2018. These are crimes related to the illegal exit of people from India, rather than illegal entry. (See chart)
The largest number of cases under these laws were filed under The Registration of Foreigners & The Foreigners Act, which deals with foreigners not reporting their entry, exit or movement within India. At least 50% of these cases were registered in West Bengal. Delhi and Punjab saw the largest number of cases under The Emigration Act, which is in keeping with anecdotal accounts of illegal migration.
An Assam-based IPS officer who didn’t want to be named admitted that there are few cases under the citizenship law. “There have been actually very few cases under The Citizenship Act, which empowers the police to imprison or deport such illegal immigrants under the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920.”
That could well be because this is an enabling act, and is not aimed at distinguishing citizens from aliens. That’s the job of the NRC, which was carried out in Assam.
The government informed Parliament in December 2019 that 289 declared foreigners were detained in Assam in 2019 and that 129,009 persons were declared as foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals in Assam as of October 2019. Assam’s NRC, the first such exercise by a state in India, excluded 1.9 million of the state’s residents. The fate of those excluded will be decided by the tribunal.
The government further told Parliament that 227 foreigners were deported to the country of their origin as on December 5, 2019.
