New Delhi
21 January 2006
After struggling for survival in a land their forefathers left several
decades ago, they can finally call India their home. Four Afghan Sikh women of a family,
who spent a decade and more as refugees in New Delhi, are now proud citizens of India.
The women, Waz Devi, Arjit Kaur, Anita Devi and Gurdarshan Kaur, recently received the
much-awaited certificates from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. The certificates, which
came after four years of painstaking documentation and procedural delays, declared
them as naturalised citizens of India and conferred on them all the rights under the
Citizenship Act.
All the four women were registered as refugees by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India. Sources said the Ministry of Home Affairs
issued the certificates in their names after Waz Devi and the others took the oath of
allegiance to the Constitution of India in the presence of the sub-divisional magistrate
concerned.
This is the first time since the UNHCR began collaborating with a non-government
organisation for legal counselling purposes that the government has agreed to confer
citizenship on the Afghan refugees registered with the UN refugee agency. There are
about 10 thousand Afghan refugees registered with UNHCR in India.
Over 700 applications have been filed since May 2003. "Five more Sikh Afghan refugees
including three of a family are also expected to become naturalised citizens soon. They
had applied in 2002 and they only need to take the oath. By March they hope to get their
certificates," the official said.
Most Afghan refugees came to India in the early 1990s and became eligible for an Indian
citizenship around the year 2002. (A refugee must have stayed in India for at least 10
years. That criterion has since been revised to 12 years.) Most of them therefore could
begin filing their applications only in 2003.
Most Sikh Afghan refugees live in clusters in Tilak Nagar while the Hindu Afghan
refugees have made Faridabad their home. The NGO started a project to facilitate the
naturalisation of Afghan refugees in association with UNHCR in January 2003 and has
helped many to process their applications since then.
No comments:
Post a Comment