Bringing relief to a Tamil repatriate from Sri Lanka, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court directed the authorities to treat the petitioner and his family as Indian citizens. The court said he was entitled to the relief measures announced by the Tamil Nadu government for Sri Lankan repatriates.
The court was hearing a petition filed by T. Ganesan, who resides at the Irumboothipatti camp in Karur district. He came from Sri Lanka to India in 1990 during the civil war. He said he was an Indian citizen and sought its confirmation. Since the authorities treated him as a Sri Lankan refugee, he had filed a petition in 2021. The court directed the Centre to consider his representation. But the authorities said the material submitted was insufficient to conclude that he was an Indian citizen. He was asked to submit conclusive evidence. The present petition challenged the directive.
Justice G.R. Swaminathan observed that Sri Lanka has the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. The Tamils, however, are not a single homogenous group. A substantial number of them was native of Sri Lanka in every sense of the term and hailed from the northern and eastern parts of the country. A section of them was descendants of workers who migrated from Tamil Nadu in the 19th Century. When Sri Lanka became independent, they were rendered stateless. The status and future of persons of Indian origin was a subject of more than one agreement between the Indian and Sri Lankan governments.
It said the petitioner’s stand was that he had submitted an application in 1970 when he was 16 years old. However, the Assistant High Commission of India in Kandy, Sri Lanka, issued a passport to the petitioner only in 1982. The Centre’s stand was that it was not sure that it was issued to the petitioner as the photograph affixed seemed to be that of a far younger person. Therefore, the petitioner was asked to furnish conclusive evidence, the court observed.
The court said the photograph was crossed by the issuing authority. Issuance of passport was a sovereign act. When the genuineness of the passport was not in doubt, the exercise of matching the photograph with the claimant had to be done only by the authority concerned. The court said Section 5(1)(b) of the Citizenship Act, 1955, empowered the Central government to register a person of Indian origin, ordinarily a resident in any country or place outside undivided India, as a citizen. The statutory scheme set out in the Passports Act, 1967, would have to be taken note of. The passport produced before the court certified that the person whose particulars were given in the passport had been registered by the attaché of the Assistant High Commission of India in Kandy as an Indian citizen under Section 5(1)(b) of the Citizenship Act, 1955.
The Indian government had undertaken to take back 6,00,000 persons of Indian origin and confer citizenship on them. As on date, citizenship was conferred only on 4,61,639 Tamils of Indian origin. It was true that the last date for applying for Indian citizenship was October 30, 1981. The specific stand of the petitioner was that he had submitted an application in 1970 itself. The petitioner came to India 33 years ago. He has grandchildren too. Article 51 of the Constitution mandates the state to foster respect for treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another. Between India and Sri Lanka, there have been three agreements on this issue.
India was obliged to take back not less than six lakh such persons and grant them citizenship. This was the figure envisaged in 1974. Half-a-century has elapsed. India will have to confer citizenship on not less than 1,37,000 Tamils of Indian origin. The figures now available indicate that there are around 5,130 applicants from among the Tamils of Indian origin. Even if all of them are granted citizenship, India will not have fulfilled its treaty obligations. The judge said. “I am not directing the Indian government to confer citizenship on the petitioner. I am only mandating it to acknowledge an existing fact. It is high time that the petitioner’s status as an Indian citizen was recognized. But mere recognition is not sufficient. He is also entitled to the rehabilitation measures announced by the government for Sri Lankan repatriates. Only if such assistance is extended to the petitioner and his family can he seamlessly integrate into the mainstream”.
