The All Assam Minorities Students’ Union (AAMSU) and the Congress on Friday said the death of a declared foreigner at a detention camp in Tezpur and the handing over of his body to his family in Udalguri district was an example of genuine Indian people being harassed in the name of detecting foreigners.

Sources said Jabbar Ali, 65, a father of two, was too poor to afford a long legal battle.

He had to stay in the detention camp for the past three years after a tribunal in Darrang district declared him a foreigner.

Ali also suffered from asthma. When his condition deteriorated, he was admitted to Kanaklata civil hospital on Wednesday night, where he died.

His post-mortem was done the same night and the body was handed over to his family at Dhansrikhuti under Rowta police station in Udalguri district.

“The state government is trying to wash its hands of the matter by handing over Ali’s body to his family. If the government was so sure that Ali belonged to that family at Dhansrikhuti, why was he kept in detention camp?” AAMSU president Azizur Rahman asked.

Ali’s lawyer M.U. Mahmud said Ali was declared a foreigner despite the fact that his father’s name was in the 1951 National Register of Citizens and subsequent voter lists.

According to the state government records, 79,000 persons have been declared foreigners by the tribunals since 1985, of which as many as 42,000 are missing, while nearly 30,000 were pushed back. There are 100 foreigners tribunals in Assam.

More than 100 declared foreigners have been deported to Bangladesh while nearly 1,000 are lodged across six detention camps in jails at Goalpara and Kokrajhar in lower Assam, Tezpur, Jorhat and Dibrugarh in Upper Assam and Silchar in south Assam’s Barak Valley.

Rahman said the people of Dhansrikhuti initially refused to conduct Ali’s janaza (funeral).

“They demanded that the superintendent of police and the deputy commissioner of Udalguri should visit the village and announce that Ali was not a foreigner. The local circle officer visited the family. The janaza was conducted under pressure of the police,” Rahman said.

The names of Ali’s father and uncle were in the 1951 NRC. “His father, uncle and brothers and other family members are Indian. How can he become a foreigner?” Rahman asked.

The minorities students’ union demanded a high-level inquiry into the circumstances that led to Ali’s death and asked for the report in 30 days.

It demanded that the government plug the lacunae in the process of detection of foreigners and direct the members of the foreigners tribunals to follow proper procedures during trial. “The government should control the border police so that they cannot target the poor and the illiterate,” he said.

Leader of the Opposition Debabrata Saikia said Ali’s case was an example of how genuine Indian people were being harassed in the name of the detection of foreigners.

Additional reporting by Pranab Kumar Das in Tezpur