GUWAHATI: A woman, who spent two years in detention after being declared a foreigner, has been granted Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Assam’s Cachar district, her lawyer said.
The woman, identified as 89-year-old Depali Das, a resident of the Hawaithang area under the Dholai assembly constituency, was declared an illegal migrant by a Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT) in February 2019.
Depali is the first declared foreigner in Assam who had once been lodged in a detention centre and later released on bail to receive Indian citizenship under the CAA. The police detained her after the tribunal’s order and sent her to the Silchar detention centre on May 10, the same year, where she remained for nearly two years before being released on bail on May 17, 2021, following a Supreme Court order, her lawyer Dharmananda Deb said.
Depali was originally a resident of Dippur village under Dhirai police station in Bangladesh’s Sylhet district and had married Abhimanyu Das of Purai village under Baniachong police station in Habiganj district in 1957, he said.
A year later, in 1958, the couple entered India and moved to Cachar district, where they have been living since then.
