The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has asked the Ministry of Home Affairs to decide on the matter concerning the citizenship of Congress MP Rahul Gandhi within four weeks – the period the Home Ministry had requested for the decision was eight weeks, i.e., until April 21.
Questions concerning Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s citizenship – since 2004 a member of parliament in the Lower House and currently Leader of the Opposition – have been doing rounds for a whole lot of years.
The present case centers around a petition filed by a private individual from Karnataka – a lawyer by the name of Vignesh Shishir who is also said to be a BJP worker – who has sought an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation on grounds he has new information with respect to this alleged citizenship status of Mr. Rahul Gandhi.
He alleged he had confidential e-mails from the British government to substantiate this assertion. “We have direct communication from the UK government that Mr. Rahul Gandhi is in their citizenship records.”
“We have presented all documents. Under Indian laws dual citizenship is not allowed. Once someone takes the citizenship of another nation, Indian citizenship gets cancelled,” he told NDTV earlier.
The Court had earlier in the matter (November last year) directed the Deputy Solicitor General SB Pandey, appearing for the home ministry, to take directions regarding the action taken on the plea, which has not yet been filed.
The Home Ministry was then ordered to respond in three weeks.
Meanwhile last month, another High Court of Delhi, hearing an identical plea filed by former BJP MP Subramanian Swamy in 2019, directed the union government to seeks instructions.
Mr. Swamy, who first raised this allegation in 2015, told a bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice TR Gedela that he had written about Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s citizenship status, but no action was taken.
Earlier the Delhi High Court had noted that there were dual proceedings in the matter, in Allahabad and in the national capital, but questioned the centre on why there seemed to be no follow-up.
Mr. Swamy’s petition is based on allegations that a UK company, which was registered in 2003 and dissolved in 2009, has put on record that Mr. Gandhi is a UK national.
The Congress party has always dismissed any talk of Mr. Gandhi being anything other than Indian. His sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, stated, “Everyone knows Rahul Gandhi is Indian and was born and raised here…” Mr. Gandhi himself said this was “an endeavour to malign my name.”
Subramanian Swamy back then charged that such declaration of British nationality by Gandhi in these documents breached both the Indian Constitution as well as the Citizenship Act, which may lead him to possess a British passport, in his appeal to the Union Home Ministry.
He told the court that after serving such notice to Gandhi regarding his claim of British citizenship, the government did not receive any reply; instead, no further actions were taken.
The court too faced a plea where advocate and BJP leader Vignesh Shishir necessitated a CBI probe into Gandhi’s citizenship status. His application was based on a previous information request concerning UK authorities lodged by VSS Sarma in 2022, aiming to ascertain Gandhi’s citizenship.
While the UK government verified some details, it did not go further to give complete information on the same because of data protection laws and the lack of Gandhi’s authorization to disclose such.
The court also directed Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma to inform the court regarding any progress made about Swamy’s request for submissions made to the ministry. “The prayer is not to decide on the substantive issues of the pending matter, whether here or in Allahabad. He is only seeking directions on his representations. Seek instructions regarding the stage of the proceedings concerning the letter,” the court articulated.
This comes on the heels of an earlier notice to the Allahabad High Court by the government indicating that it had a petition pending on an allegation that Gandhi may be a dual citizen. This probe was partly sparked by alleged emails from the UK government, which were introduced as evidence to support the charge of Gandhi’s British citizenship.
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