Assam Assembly passes UCC Bill, CM Sarma calls it ‘most secular, uniform and progressive law’
With the passage of the proposed legislation, Assam has now emerged as the third state, after Uttarakhand and Gujarat, to pass a Uniform Civil Code Bill.
In a policy shift on detection of illegal migrants, the Assam government has framed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to implement the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, for the detection and deportation of foreigners, which allows 10 10-day window to a suspected individual to prove his or her Indian citizenship.
In a policy shift, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that the state government has framed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to operationalise the long-dormant Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950.
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Briefing the media, Sarma said the move comes after the Supreme Court’s directives, which clarified that the Assam government is empowered to invoke the 1950 Act to identify and expel illegal immigrants.
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“Under this Act, the Deputy Commissioner is empowered by the Centre to evacuate any person considered to be a foreigner. For the first time, the State Cabinet has decided to implement this law in letter and spirit,” the Chief Minister said.
According to the newly framed SOP, the Deputy Commissioner of a district will serve notice to any suspected individual, granting them 10 days to prove their Indian citizenship.
If, after a hearing, the individual is determined to be a foreign national, an immediate order of eviction will follow.
The foreigner will then be “evacuated or pushed back” from Assam without delay.
In cases where the Deputy Commissioner cannot arrive at a definitive conclusion, the matter will be referred to the state’s Foreigners’ Tribunals for further adjudication.
Sarma described this as a “landmark decision” that would simplify and fast-track the process of identifying and deporting illegal foreigners.
The Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, was enacted by the Indian Parliament in the wake of Partition, when large numbers of people crossed into Assam from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Act empowers the Central Government to order the removal of individuals whose presence in Assam is deemed “detrimental to the interests of the general public or any Scheduled Tribe.”
Despite its existence, the Act has rarely been implemented in the past. Successive governments instead relied on the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the extensive network of Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam. The new SOP marks the first structured attempt to operationalise the 1950 law in the state’s modern context.
Illegal immigration has been one of Assam’s most sensitive political issues for decades, shaping electoral politics, social movements, and communal tensions.
The Assam Accord of 1985, signed after the six-year-long Assam Agitation, had set March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date for detecting and deporting foreigners.
By reviving the 1950 Act, the Assam government is signaling a tougher stance. Sarma asserted that the move was necessary to “safeguard the rights of the indigenous people of Assam” and claimed that “never before has this Act been implemented in such a manner.”
The decision is likely to reignite debates around citizenship, migration, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which excluded nearly 19 lakh applicants in its 2019 list but remains stuck in legal and political uncertainty.
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