Bangladeshi issue needs bilateral solution, not ‘pushback drama’ says Akhil Gogoi
GUWAHATI A day after the Supreme Court set aside a batch of Gauhati High Court’s judgments on people declared as foreigners, Assam MLA Akhil Gogoi
GUWAHATI A day after the Supreme Court set aside a batch of Gauhati High Court’s judgments on people declared as foreigners, Assam MLA Akhil Gogoi said the Bangladeshi issue needs a bilateral solution, not any “pushback drama”. Gogoi, who heads the Raijor Dal party and represents the Sibsagar constituency, slammed Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for using the pushback of alleged illegal Bangladeshi nationals to keep the “illegal immigration” issue alive without establishing any legal mechanism to deport them. “Himanta Biswa Sarma turns a non-issue into an issue. The issue of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants can only be resolved through talks with Bangladesh. The Assam government has neither held any bilateral talks with Bangladesh nor created any legal mechanism to push undocumented Bangladeshi nationals back into the neighbouring country,” he told journalists on Tuesday (July 14, 2026).
Mr Gogoi said “pushback drama” was nothing but optics that the Bharatiya Janata Party thrives on. “Illegal immigration remains a major issue in Assam, but this government’s pushback strategy is meaningless without any legal validity,” he said. He hoped that New Delhi would hold discussions with Dhaka and reach an agreement on the sensitive issue. “Given India’s stature, we should ensure that Bangladesh takes back its people detained for illegally entering the country,” he said. On Monday (July 13, 2026), the Supreme Court set aside a batch of judgments passed by the Gauhati High Court, which upheld the orders of various Foreigners’ Tribunals declaring 27 appellants as foreigners.
The apex court remanded the cases to the quasi-judicial tribunals concerned for fresh adjudication. In January, the Chief Minister said a repatriation treaty with Bangladesh was not necessary to intensify the pushback of “illegal immigrants” under a new policy framework. He said more than 2,000 foreigners who stayed illegally in Assam were pushed back over the past few months. He attributed the pushback drive to the revitalisation of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, with a standard operating procedure for swift action, allowing District Commissioners to issue orders for suspected foreigners to leave within 10 days, with expulsion within 24 hours if they cannot prove citizenship.
“We are not talking about a repatriation treaty (with Bangladesh), and we don’t need it. Just pushing back the foreigners will be the new way to deal with foreigners,” he said, announcing the government’s resolve to intensify the identification and deportation of such people over the next five years. Over the past few months, Assam had to take back several “Bangladeshi nationals” pushed back across at least three sections of the State’s border with Bangladesh.
The BriefWire