The petition tells a stark story, one the Court has not tested: a woman said to be a lifelong Indian citizen, working as a domestic worker in Mumbai, detained and, within days, put across the border into Bangladesh, without a magistrate, without grounds, and without her nationality ever being verified. Her son has asked the Supreme Court to bring her back and to strike down the procedures he says made this possible. The Court has issued notice and sought the government’s response; nothing has been decided.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has issued notice on a petition filed by a man alleging that his mother, said to be an Indian citizen from West Bengal, was detained in Mumbai and forcibly removed, or “pushed out”, to Bangladesh without any verification of her nationality, and has sought the response of the Union Government [Sahin Fakir v. Union of India and Others].
A Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana passed the order. Senior Advocate Dr. S. Muralidhar appeared for the petitioner.
The allegations
The habeas corpus petition, which refers to the petitioner’s mother as a person “pushed out” rather than a detenu, states that she is an Indian citizen permanently resident in North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, who had travelled to Mumbai about twenty years ago with her husband in search of work and was employed there as a domestic worker.
According to the petition, she was apprehended in Mumbai on July 19 and detained, and then removed to Bangladesh. She is said to have remained in custody for more than 100 hours without being produced before a Judicial Magistrate, without being informed of the grounds of detention, and without any communication with her family, before being handed to the Border Security Force, taken to the north-eastern region, and pushed across the international border. The petition states that no judicial determination of her nationality, deportation proceeding, consular verification or meaningful opportunity to contest the allegation of Bangladeshi nationality was afforded to her. It states that she later received temporary humanitarian shelter across the border and contacted her family at the end of July.
These are the allegations in the petition. They have not been tested, and the Court has, at this stage, only issued notice.
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The documents relied on, and the SIR link
On the question of her citizenship, the petition asserts that she was lawfully present in India throughout and that her Indian identity is supported by identity and civil documents and by historical electoral records. It states that while her grandfather’s name appears in the 1952 electoral roll and her parents’ names in the 2002 roll, her own name was removed from the rolls following the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision, a deletion that has been challenged before the Appellate Tribunal in West Bengal.
The challenge to the SOP and the 2025 Order
Beyond his mother’s case, the petitioner challenges a Standard Operating Procedure of May 2, 2025 titled “Procedure for deportation of illegal Bangladeshi nationals/Rohingya”, and the Immigration and Foreigners Order, 2025, to the extent that they are said to facilitate the removal of persons from India without the safeguards prescribed by law. He alleges that this framework concentrates in the executive the functions of identification, investigation, determination and execution of removal, without adequate safeguards against the wrongful identification and expulsion of Indian citizens, in violation of Articles 14, 21 and 22.
At the heart of the legal challenge is an alleged gap between two instruments. The petition contends that although Paragraph 9(iv) of the SOP contemplates verification where a person suspected to be a Bangladeshi or Myanmar national claims Indian citizenship and residence in another State or Union Territory, it does not contain the nationality-verification procedure set out in Paragraph 12(4)(C) of the 2025 Order. That provision, the petition states, contemplates verification of the nationality of an alleged illegal migrant apprehended without a valid passport or travel document, including obtaining the necessary travel document through the Ministry of External Affairs before deportation. The petitioner’s mother, it is stated, had no passport or travel document when she was apprehended, and the verification the petitioner says was due under Paragraph 9(iv) was not carried out.
The petition seeks her protection from adverse action and her immediate repatriation to India, asserting that the “push out” was illegal and violative of her rights under Articles 14, 19 and 21.
Why it matters
The case sits at a fraught intersection: the State’s undoubted power to identify and remove foreigners who are unlawfully present, and the constitutional protection that no citizen may be expelled from the country or deprived of liberty without due process. The petition’s core legal contention is not that foreigners cannot be deported, but that a process which allows the executive alone to decide, on its own satisfaction and without independent verification, that a person is a foreigner, and then to remove them within days, carries an inherent risk of sweeping up citizens by mistake, a risk the Constitution’s safeguards exist to prevent.
The specific gap the petition identifies, between the verification the SOP provides and the fuller nationality-verification procedure in the 2025 Order, is the kind of point on which such cases turn. If a person without travel documents who claims Indian citizenship is entitled to a defined verification process before removal, and that process was not followed, the removal may be vulnerable regardless of what the eventual truth about nationality proves to be, because it is the denial of the process, not the outcome, that the law polices. That the deletion of the woman’s name occurred through the Special Intensive Revision, itself the subject of separate litigation, ties this petition to the wider and continuing controversy over electoral-roll revision in the State.
Two cautions are essential. Everything recounted here is the petitioner’s assertion; the Union Government has not yet responded, and the Court has expressed no view on whether the woman is an Indian citizen, whether she was in fact removed as alleged, or whether the procedures are unlawful. Notice is the beginning of the inquiry, not its result. It is relevant, as reported, that the Centre has in the recent past told the Supreme Court that it repatriated, on humanitarian grounds, certain persons who had been sent to Bangladesh, which indicates that questions of this kind have arisen before and that the government has in some instances acted to reverse such removals. What this Court will now examine, once the Centre replies, is whether the procedures are adequate and whether, in this case, they were followed.
Case Title: Sahin Fakir v. Union of India and Others [WP (Crl) No. 372 of 2026]
Bench: Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana, Supreme Court of India
Appearing: Senior Advocate Dr. S. Muralidhar with AOR Prasanna S. and others for the petitioner
Status: Notice issued; response of the Union Government sought. Allegations untested; no findings recorded.