Reacting to the Ministry of Home Affairs statement that it was planning to revoke the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status granted to him, writer Aatish Taseer has called it an act of “reprisal”, in retaliation for an essay he had written criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In an article in Time magazine published on Friday, Mr. Taseer said that in sending him into “exile”, the government was reacting to an article, also in the same magazine in May 2019, which had referred to Mr. Modi as the “Divider in Chief” of India. Mr. Modi had subsequently dismissed the criticism saying “ Time magazine is foreign, the writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.”
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“I had expected a reprisal, but not a severing. While the government did not initially reveal their motivations behind this action, they have now stated their reasons for removing my OCI: “concealed the fact that his late father was of Pakistani origin.” But it is hard not to feel, given the timing, that I was being punished for what I had written,” Mr. Taseer wrote in the latest article.
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BJP’s foreign affairs department chief Vijay Chauthaiwale, who has traded barbs with Mr. Taseer on Twitter for the last few days, denied the accusation that the government’s action came from a desire for revenge.
“Aatish Taseer has not admitted that he has not disclosed in his OCI application that one [of] his parents is Pakistani, which disqualifies him from getting OCI card, irrespective of whether he wrote an anti-Modi article in the Time magazine,” he tweeted on Friday.
Decision slammed
Opposition leaders criticised the government’s decision. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said it was “painful” that such action had been taken “in our democracy”. “Is our Govt so weak that it feels threatened by a journalist?”, he added. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh “condemned” the Home Ministry action, but said it was “only to be expected.” “All critical voices are either snooped on, harassed or muzzled,” he tweeted.
Mr. Taseer’s mother and senior journalist Tavleen Singh, who raised Mr. Taseer single-handedly, and had not been legally married to his father, the half-Pakistani and half-British Punjab (Pakistan) governor Salman Taseer, also drew a link between her son’s article and the MHA decision.
“Aatish’s mother has also always been an Indian citizen. And, his right to live here was never questioned until he wrote an article that the Home Minister [Amit Shah] did not like,” Ms. Singh tweeted.
According to the records, Mr. Taseer, a British passport holder, was granted a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card in 2000, and then granted an OCI in 2016, after PIO cards were phased out. The government has said that he concealed the fact that his biological father, who was a British passport holder, was also Pakistani, which disqualified him.
In 2016, the Modi government had amended passport rules so single mothers can apply for their child without reference to biological fathers, but has not extended that to OCI requirements yet.
A year prior to that, in its 2015 amendment to the citizenship law, the Modi government had mandated that no one with a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent who is Pakistani or Bangladeshi can be given an OCI card.
In his reply to the MHA notice, Mr. Taseer had told the government that he only had a single parent, his mother, who had raised him in India, a contention that was rejected by the MHA.
Painful, says Tharoor
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said it was “painful” that such action had been taken “in our democracy”. “Is our Govt so weak that it feels threatened by a journalist?”, he added.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh “condemned” the Home Ministry action, but said it was “only to be expected.” “All critical voices are either snooped on, harassed or muzzled,” he tweeted.
International Press freedom organisations Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN America also issued statements asking the government to reconsider its decision.
