800 persecuted Pakistani Hindus returned after failing to get Citizenship in India
800 persecuted Pakistani Hindus returned to Pakistan after failing to acquire Indian Citizenship. They were frustrated with the slow online process of the same which made no progress for years.
A rights advocacy group Seemant Lok Sangathan said in a report that around 800 Pakistani Hindus who migrated to Rajasthan due to persecution in their original home country-Pakistan returned as they failed to secure citizenship in India due to red-tapism. They were frustrated with the fact that their application saw no progress by the Home Ministry.
Seemant Lok Sangathan (SLS), is a group that advocates for the rights of Pakistani minority migrants in India. “Once they return, they are used by Pakistani agencies to defame India. They are paraded before the media and made to say that they were ill-treated here,” Hindu Singh Sodha, president, of SLS, said.
The Citizenship Amendment Act ( CAA), which was passed by the Parliament in 2019 is yet to come into force as the rules that govern the law have not been notified by the Ministry yet. This law fast tracks the citizenship of persecuted minorities by reducing the mandatory requirement of 11 years aggregate stay in India to five years to be eligible for citizenship.
Though apparently, the Indian Government is currently headed by a Hindu Nationalist Party they seem to have been of no benefit to the persecuted minorities from the neighboring countries. The reason given by the Government for its delay to notify the law is the Covid Pandemic.
According to a report in the Hindu, The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) initiated an online citizenship application process in 2018. It also made 16 Collectors in seven States accept online applications to grant citizenship to Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, Jain, and Buddhists from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.
In May 2021, the MHA empowered 13 more District Collectors in five States — Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab — to grant citizenship certificates to applicants belonging to the six communities under Section 5 (registration) and Section 6 (naturalization) of Citizenship Act, 1955.
This online process does not accept expired Pakistani passports and the persecuted minorities are forced to renew the same by paying a hefty sum. “If it is a family of ten, then they end up spending more than ₹1 lakh at the Pakistan High Commission to get the passports renewed. These people come to India amid great financial hardships and to cough up such a high amount of money is not feasible,” Mr. Singh, who is based in Jodhpur, said.
According to the MHA, 10,635 applications for citizenship were pending with them out of which 7,306 applicants were from persecuted minorities who migrated from Pakistan. According to reports, more than 25,000 Pakistani Hindus staying in Rajasthan are awaiting their citizenship with some even having spent more than 2 decades for the same.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy, on Monday, slammed the Union Government for the same via a tweet. “What a shame for our BJP Union Government that Hindu victims of human rights violation by Pak Govt, about 800 of those who had escaped to India, hoping to become Indian citizens have been betrayed by non-action of Modi Govt on CAA, and so have gone back heartbroken to Pakistan,” Swamy said in a tweet.
