Gauhati High Court orders Assam to pay ₹2 lakh to family of woman sent to Bangladesh

The Gauhati High Court has ordered the Assam government to pay ₹2 lakh in interim compensation to the husband of Mumtaz Begum, a Bengali-speaking Muslim woman who authorities sent to Bangladesh after a foreigners tribunal declared her a foreign national.

The court said Begum had been expelled without informing her husband or another adult family member. A bench of Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Susmita Phukan Khaund ordered the payment within 60 days and said her husband, Mujammel Hoque, could seek further relief from a civil court.

The bench also brought the Ministry of External Affairs into the case. It said the ministry should try to locate Begum in Bangladesh and make efforts to bring her back to India. The case began after Hoque went to the high court in June, having failed to find his wife at the detention camp in Matia, in Assam’s Goalpara district.

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As the detenue, the woman, has been expelled out of India without providing any information to the petitioner, the woman’s husband, or any adult family member, as an interim palliative measure, the court is inclined to direct the Assam government to pay an interim compensation of ₹2 lakh to the petitioner.

Authorities later told the court that Begum had been handed over to the Border Security Force and “sent back to Bangladesh” at midnight on June 14 through an international border point in Sribhumi district. The disclosure came only after Hoque’s habeas corpus petition reached a hearing in late June.

Begum’s case had already been before the high court. The Nagaon foreigners tribunal declared her a foreigner in 2019, despite documents showing that her grandfather’s name appeared on voter lists from before 1971, the citizenship cutoff used in Assam. The high court set aside that decision in April and sent the matter back for a fresh ruling.

But after Begum appeared before the tribunal on May 30, police detained her within minutes. She spent the night at Juria police station before being moved to the Matia detention centre. The high court said Begum and her family had not been informed of the tribunal’s order, removed from the district, or given an opportunity to appeal.

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sent back to Bangladesh