The Indian government has asked five foreigners to leave the country for violating their visa norms by participating in protests against the amendments to the Citizenship Act, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs told Parliament on Tuesday.
Minister of State Nityanand Rai was responding to a question posed by Indian Union Muslim League MP from Malappuram in Kerala, PK Kunhalikutty, and Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh’s Nalgonda constituency, Uttam Kumar Reddy.
“As reported by the Bureau of Immigration, 5 foreign nationals who violated visa norms by participating in the anti-CAA protests were asked to leave India,” he said in his written reply to the Lok Sabha. However, he did not mention the details of these five people.
According to various news reports, four cases of foreigners who have been asked to leave India have been made public.
In February, a Polish student at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Kamil Siedcynski, was asked to leave India because he attended a rally against the amended Citizenship Act on December 19. Kamil Siedcynski was a student of comparative literature at Jadavpur University and was also translating several Polish works into Bengali.
On February 14, a Bangladeshi student at West Bengal’s Visva-Bharati University was asked to leave India for taking part in “anti-government activities” after she posted pictures of Citizenship Act protests on her campus. The student, Afsara Anika Meem, a first-year student at the university, was trolled on social media after she posted the photos.
One of her friends claimed that around 250 social media posts described her as an “anti-national” even though she did not participate in the demonstrations. Her posts attracted attention from pro-government trolls who demanded that she be sent back. Meem, who is originally from Kushtia district in Bangladesh, came to India late in 2018 for a bachelors’ course in design from the university’s department of fine arts.
In December, a German exchange student at Indian Institute of Technology-Madras was sent back to his country for participating in protests against the Citizenship Act. Jakob Lindenthal was an exchange student at IIT-Madras’ Department of Physics. The Centre has also rescinded his visa. Lindenthal had said the anti-Citizenship Act demonstrations in India showed that political freedom and rule of law need the support of millions of people. During a protest in Chennai, he had carried a poster that made a reference to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler: “1933 to 1945 – we have been there.”
A 74-year-old Norwegian woman, Janne-Mette Johansson, was also asked to leave India in December for participating in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Kochi.
The Citizenship Amendment Act has triggered protests across India since being approved by Parliament on December 11. The legislation provides citizenship to people from six religious minority groups in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, provided they have lived in India for six years. The cut-off date is December 31, 2014. The law has attracted widespread criticism as it excludes Muslims.
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