A ostracize of Sikh overseas nationals who have been banned from traveling to India for a decade has been condensed from 314 to just 2, a senior home ministry official said on Friday.
The 312 nationals detached from the blacklist, officially called the Central Adverse List, will be “qualified to get Indian visa and the Overseas Indian Card” in due course, the official stated.
The decision to carve down the list was taken after a “review” of pressure posed by these people to India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first to have granted to review the list at a meeting with UK-based Sikhs during a visit to the UK in 2015 and National Security consultant Ajit Doval to lead the exercise within the security enterprise.
Over the next four years, officials said the list had been increasingly trimmed but there had been calls to do away with the list that, Sikh groups say, had come to represent “the relationship between Sikh living overseas and Indians the 1984 Operation Bluestar”.
These ostracized Sikhs have been mostly living in the US and Canada in North America; and the UK, France, and Germany. It has included Sikh society leaders who promoted the cause of Khalistan, former militants, those associated with the philosophy without an illegal record, and those who sought political refuge challenging the threat to their lives from the Indian officials.
“This review is an incessant and active process and is a part of a standard exercise. Such a review will afford an occasion to such Sikh overseas nationals to visit India, meet their family members and reconnect to their roots, ” the official stated.
During the 1980s – when the militant association for a divided Sikh native soil was at its peak – many Sikh Indian nationals and overseas nationals belonging to Sikh society fell to anti-India misinformation.
Some of them even fled India to get away from Indian authorities, became overseas nationals and took refuge outside India. They were placed in the adverse list till 2016, making them disqualified to gain visa services to visit India, ” the official mentioned.
These people will also be qualified to apply for registration as Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) cardholder after they have held normal visas for at least two years.
