District Collector of Ahmedabad, Sandeep Sangle, has granted Indian citizenship to 11 Pakistani Hindus. According to reports, letters of the district collector were given in a special camp arranged at the Collector’s office on Sunday. The citizenship documents were handed over after procedures including the Intelligence Bureau (IB) check of the applications were completed.
Also, another process has been initiated to grant Indian citizenship to 9 more Pakistani Hindus who have applied for the Indian citizenship. The applications are being considered and a thorough investigation by the IB team of the state and central government is expected before these people are given acceptance letters.
Accordingly, after the investigation process, citizenship certificate would be issued from the office of the District Collector.
The citizenship certificate is given to foreign nationals and minorities who have been staying at any one site in India for the last seven years, according to the the constitutional process.
The District Collector’s office has issued citizenship to 868 foreigners by now. The 11 people who obtained Indian Citizenship were all citizens of Pakistan living in Ahmedabad in India.
Earlier this year, the Modi government invited applications from persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Jains and Buddhists belonging to Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan and residing in 13 districts in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Punjab to grant them Indian citizenship.
The Union Home Ministry had also issued a notification for people belonging to six persecuted communities to apply for a certificate of naturalisation under the Citizenship Act 1955 and the citizenship rules framed under the law in 2009.
Earlier in 2019, the Rajasthan government had also granted Indian citizenship to 34 Pakistani migrant Hindus living in 3 districts in Rajasthan. According to reports, many of those Hindus have been lived in India for over a decade. The group included 19 people from Barmer, 10 from Pali and 5 from Jalore district in Rajasthan.
