A 40-year-old woman from Assam’s Sribhumi district has become the first person in the state to be granted Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) through the registration route, senior advocate Dharmananda Deb said. The woman entered India from Bangladesh in 2007 and came to Silchar to accompany a relative for treatment at Silchar Medical College and Hospital.
During her stay she met and married a man from Sribhumi (formerly Karimganj district) and settled in Assam. The couple has a son while her family continues to live in Bangladesh’s Chittagong. After the CAA rules were notified last year, she applied for citizenship. Her first application, submitted in July, was rejected due to jurisdictional confusion caused by the delimitation exercise ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, as the Badarpur area where she lives was partly shifted from Sribhumi to Cachar district.
The application was later refiled and approved. Deb said the citizenship was granted under Section 5(1)(c), read with Section 6B of the Citizenship Act, 1955, which allows a person married to an Indian citizen to register for citizenship after seven years of residence. She is also the first woman in Assam to receive citizenship under the CAA.
