Fifteen-year-old Sufaira Jan of Kashmir’s Beerwah township has received her passport to visit the U.S. Earlier, her antecedents clearance had been withheld by Criminal Investigation Department of the State Government on account of her uncle’s alleged militant background.
Srinagar Regional Passport Officer Firdaus Iqbal told The Hindu that Sufaira’s passport was created and completed within an hour after the CID Headquarters furnished her Police and intelligence clearance. He said that he called up the patron of the orphanage Gulshan-e-Banaat and Jammu and Kashmir Yateem Trust Zahoor Ahmad Tak and advised him to bring the applicant with him to the RPO for collecting the passport.
Sufaira, accompanied by Mr Tak, reached the RPO and collected her passport.
Other Indian students selected for a scholarship-based youth exchange and education programme in the United States of America have already left the country as per their schedule. They include Bushra of Delhi Public School Srinagar, who along with Sufaira, had been picked up from Kashmir after cracking a series of online tests and an interview by the US embassy officials in New Delhi.
“Though all other students have already left, we are requesting the programme sponsors through New Delhi-based NGO AFS and the US embassy to condone Sufaira’s late arrival. We are hopeful that they will be kind to this exceptionally talented girl," Mr Tak said.
Sufaira had applied for the passport on April 25. Officials at CID office in Srinagar reportedly told her relatives that Sufaira’s passport clearance could not be issued as her uncle Farooq Ahmad Ganai had been a militant before his surrender in 1995. Sufaira was born in October 1997. She was adopted by the charity J&K Yateem Trust and admitted to the orphanage’s boarding school after her father died in 2002.
