The Gauhati High Court has held that presenting forged, fabricated, or altered pleadings in a writ petition constitutes sufficient ground to dismiss the case at the threshold. A Division Bench comprising Justice Kalyan Rai Surana and Justice Shamima Jahan condemned the practice as an unpardonable attempt by the litigant and his counsel to mislead the judiciary. Consequently, the Court ordered a copy of its judgment alongside the advocates' vakalatnama to be forwarded to the Bar Council of Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh for appropriate scrutiny.
The ruling came during the hearing of a petition by Nurul Hoque, who had approached the High Court challenging a 2018 Foreigners Tribunal decision that declared him a post-1971 illegal entrant. Upon cross-checking the writ annexures with the original record, the Bench uncovered glaring discrepancies—including omitted paragraphs, conflicting places of birth, mismatched exhibit lists, and evident physical tampering via erasure and overwriting on the sworn affidavit.
Despite recognizing that the fraudulent filings alone justified throwing out the petition in limine, the Bench nonetheless reviewed the dispute on its merits because the fundamental issue of citizenship was at stake. Concluding that the petitioner failed to discharge his statutory burden of proof under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946—and reiterating that documents like Aadhaar cards establish identity rather than citizenship—the High Court dismissed the petition, upheld the Tribunal's declaration, and revoked the interim bail previously granted to him in 2019.