The Indian-origin woman, Ila Popat, claimed in her plea filed before a bench led by Justice SV Gangapurwala that she was born in Uganda in East Africa and came to India on her mother’s Indian passport in 1956.
Without any citizenship papers or an Indian passport, a 66-year-old woman who has lived in India for more than 50 years asked the Bombay High Court on Friday to order the Union government to award her citizenship.
Ila Popat, an individual of Indian descent, asserted in a petition brought before a court panel presided over by Justice SV Gangapurwala that she was born in Uganda in East Africa and immigrated to India in 1956 when she was ten years old using her mother’s Indian passport.
The woman, who was born in September 1955 and currently resides in Andheri, claimed that the deputy collector of Mumbai had rejected her application for registration as an Indian citizen in 2019 because of an unintentional error on her part. She asked the high court to order the authorities to reconsider the decision and grant her Indian citizenship.
Aditya Chitale, the petitioner’s attorney, explained to a division bench of Justices S V Gangapurwala and S M Modak that the petitioner had been living in India since 1966 when she arrived with her mother and had mistakenly indicated on her online application that her visa was valid until 2019. As a result, the petitioner was denied Indian citizenship by the authorities, which led her to file a case with the high court.
The petitioner claimed that in order to obtain an Indian passport, she had applied for citizenship and for passports three times, attempting to include her parents’ British passports in the process. She did not have the paperwork that were required to prove her mode of transportation to India, which were requested.
The Regional Passport Office had advised the petitioner to apply for citizenship in order to obtain a passport; she therefore did so online, but the authority denied her application. According to advocate Advait Sethna, who was arguing on behalf of the Ministry of External Affairs, the woman could be given citizenship provided she produced a passport from a different nation. He claimed that the petitioner had sought the British Embassy because both of her parents had British passports, but the embassy had turned her down because she lacked the necessary paperwork.
Sethna told the petitioner that they could go to the Ugandan embassy to obtain the necessary paperwork and that the Center was not treating the petition as an adversarial matter.
The judge postponed the plea and requested that the central government submit its response by the next hearing on August 22 after the petitioner’s attorney requested more time to get her instructions.
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