Peoples Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti on Monday sought External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s intervention to facilitate the clearance of her and her mother’s passports, The Hindu reported.
Mufti told Jaishankar that the matter has been “dragged on needlessly for the last three years”.
In a letter, Mufti told the minister that she had applied for fresh passports in March after the previous ones expired. However, the Jammu and Kashmir Police opposed giving her and her mother Gulshan Nazir a passport, citing “adverse reports”.
“Jammu and Kashmir CID gave an adverse report that issuing passports to my eighty-year-old mother and me would undermine national security,” she said in the letter. “In Jammu and Kashmir it has become the norm to arbitrarily reject passport applications of thousands including journalists, students and others by misusing national interest as a pretext.”
Mufti had first approached the passport office in Srinagar for renewal of their passports in 2020, reported the Hindustan Times. As she was denied renewal, the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister moved the High Court.
“We moved the Jammu and Kashmir High Court and after the case dragged on for three years, the honourable court gave clear directions that the regional passport officer in Srinagar shouldn’t operate as CID’s mouthpiece by denying passports on vague grounds,” she said.
Mufti said that she was then told to approach the Passport Authority of India, which she did multiple times, but has not received a “positive response”.
The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister told Jaishankar that she was writing to him because she intended to take her mother on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
“As a daughter, I feel pained and anguished to be unable to fulfil such a simple wish because of petty politics,” she said. “I write to you hoping that you will look into the matter urgently.”
She said the “inordinate and deliberate delay” in issuing her passport is a grave violation of her fundamental right. “If suspending my basic rights in a democracy like ours is done with such brazen impunity and contempt, one can’t even imagine what an ordinary Kashmiri goes through,” the former chief minister said.
Mufti also told Jaishankar that her daughter lltija Mufti too had applied for her passport renewal in June 2022 but the application is stuck as “it seems that the passport officer in Srinagar is yet again failing to discharge its duty,”
The High Court had heard a petition by Iltija Mufti on Monday and directed the government to submit a reply within two weeks. The case will be heard further on March 18.
Mufti was placed under detention under the Public Safety Act on August 5, 2019 – the day the Centre revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution. She was released from detention after over a year on October 13, 2020.
Currently, the Enforcement Directorate is investigating allegations of money laundering against the PDP chief.
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