Mohammad Sanaullah, the 52-year-old Kargil veteran who was declared a non-citizen by an Assam foreigners' tribunal, today did not find his name in the final NRC list.

Neither were his three children on the list, said his son and lawyer Shohidul Islam. Only Sanaullah's wife made it as an Indian citizen. Earlier, she too had been kept out.

Sanaullah's plea against the foreigners' tribunal order is pending in Gauhati High Court, and till the case is not decided he is likely to remain excluded.

The former subedar was arrested in May this year after a tribunal declared him a “foreign national”.

The move was linked to Assam’s elaborate process of weeding out foreign nationals whose names do not feature in the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) and whose citizenship is now in doubt.

The most glaring point in Sanaullah's case was that he had served in the Indian Army for 30 years from 1987 to 2017 but somehow the tribunal did not take this record into consideration.

Sanaullah had submitted a copy of his army discharge book that recorded his date of birth as 30-07-1967. It said Sanaullah’s date of enrolment in the army was May 21, 1987, and the date of discharge from the force was May 31, 2017.

But the tribunal took the findings of an inquiry report of the Assam border police submitted to the foreigners’ tribunal in 2008 which claimed that Sanaullah was 50 years old and his profession was 'labour'. The report stated that he came to India through a secret route for a better living. His wife's nationality was also suspect, the report said.

At the time the border police’s report was prepared in 2008, Sanaullah was then serving in a counter-insurgency operation in Manipur, documents submitted by him showed.

A decade later, the foreigners’ tribunal sent a notice to Sanaullah in September 2018 when the people in Assam were grappling with the post-NRC-draft scenario in the state.

In its order, the tribunal mentioned that Sanaullah had “produced a large number of documents in support of his contentions”, including a voter’s list, school certificate, land documents and a village certificate. The tribunal, however, wasn’t satisfied with the documents.

Aman Wadud, a Guwahati-based lawyer who has been taking such cases to the high court and the Supreme Court, had said in May that tribunals never questioned the veracity of the report filed by the border police.

“There was no investigation before Sanaullah was accused of being a ‘foreigner’,” Wadud said. “The border police prepared the verification report without even meeting him and said he is a labourer…. The foreigners’ tribunal mechanically declared him a foreigner without appreciating all his documents.”

His arrest set off a wave on Twitter. Various tweets have tagged Narendra Modi and the Indian Army asking for action to save the soldier.