SC junks Pakistani Christian's plea for citizenship ignoring CAA cut-off
Supreme Court
NEW DELHI: The
Supreme Court
on Wednesday refused to entertain the plea of a Goa-born Pakistani Catholic man, who sought a direction to the Centre to allow him citizenship under
Citizenship Amendment Act
, 2019 citing religious persecution in Pakistan even though he arrived in India six years after the Jan 2014 cutoff date.
Jude Mendes, who was born in Goa to a Pakistani national in 1987 but completed his studies at Karachi in Pakistan, arrived in India in 2016 on a long-term visa which has been extended till June this year and even got his Aadhaar card made in 2020. He married an Indian woman in February this year.
Three days after the Pahalgam terror attack on tourists by Pak-backed terrorists, India on April 25 cancelled all kinds of visas given to Pakistani nationals.
However, long term visas, which Mendes has, have not been revoked. Mendes' visa expires on June 20.
Advocate Raghav Awasthi told a partial working day bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Manmohan that "the Petitioner is born in India and is a Roman Catholic which being a minority community is heavily persecuted in Pakistan. He cannot travel to Pakistan to renew his passport which is expiring on 20.06.2025 due to the threat to his life and that therefore, he ought to be granted extension of his long-term visa.
" The petitioner said in the event of his deportation to Pakistan, the petitioner who was born in India and now lawfully married to an Indian citizen, would face imminent threat to his life because of extreme religious persecution in Pakistan. At present he works as a chef in Goa.
But the bench said that he would have to move the Bombay HC for the relief he is seeking. The petitioner's lawyer withdrew the plea to move the HC. Under CAA, India had resolved to grant citizenship to those individuals from minority communities who have been persecuted in neighbouring countries on the ground of religion. However, the law stipulated that they should have entered India prior to Jan 1, 2014.
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