London: On a cold November morning in 2022, writer and activist Amrit Wilson picked up a letter that arrived at the doorstep of her home in London.
The letter from the high commission of India in London, accused the 82-year-old of involvement in “multiple anti-India activities” and “detrimental propaganda” against the Indian government, “inimical to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India”.
The notice did not provide instances or supply proof of such involvement, only giving Wilson 15 days to explain why her overseas citizen of India (OCI) status, granted to her in 2017, should not be cancelled.
The OCI was created in 2005 under the Citizenship Act, 1955, to allow foreign citizens of Indian-origin or foreigners married to Indian citizens to enter India without a visa, reside, work and hold property, among other benefits.
Born in Kolkata, Wilson came to London in 1961 as a 21-year-old PhD student and stayed on, becoming an active voice on issues of racism and labour rights pertaining to South Asian women.
She acquired British citizenship in 2009 and made yearly visits to her home in Delhi and to the Berhampore Girls’ College in Murshidabad, West Bengal, founded by her parents in 1946.
At least two others who spoke to Article 14 narrated how their OCI status had been cancelled, effectively ending their ability to return to their country of origin. We can also confirm that three people of Indian origin were blacklisted for tweets against Hindu nationalism and voicing support for protests by farmers between 2020 and 2021.
Over 4.5 million people across the world are overseas citizens of India, and data released by the union ministry of home affairs, in response to an Article 14 query filed in June 2023 under the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005, revealed that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party cancelled at least 102 OCI cards between 2014 and May 2023.
Many in the diaspora were hesitant to speak to Article 14 for this story fearing repercussions from the Indian government and its consulates. Interviews with those who did revealed a pattern of punitive action for criticising Modi, his government or its policies, with little scope for appeal, save a stray court decision, if they chose to pursue that expensive, arduous route.
Some of those whose OCIs were cancelled lived in India, mostly foreign citizens married to Indians. In our interviews, we found the government largely ignored responses to its “show-cause notices”, going ahead with cancellations anyway.
Article 14 sought comment from the ministry of home affairs, which oversees the programme, on the process followed in cancelling OCI cards. There was no response. We will update this story if there is.
‘The Charges Are Completely Absurd’
Wilson sent her response in December 2022, denying the allegations. She did not hear back for three months, until another letter arrived in March 2023.
The letter said her response was “bereft of plausible explanation” and “unsatisfactory”, declared that her OCI status was cancelled and directed her to surrender her OCI card.
“I was literally shocked,” she told Article 14 on a January evening in 2024 at her home in London. She could barely stand for beyond a few minutes. The cold had stiffened her joints, and her knees hurt, she said.
“The charges are completely absurd,” said Wilson, a member of the South Asia Solidarity Group, a UK-based “anti-imperialist, anti-racist” collective. “I have never endangered Indian sovereignty. I am a proud Indian who stands with Indian people.”
In May 2023, she filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court challenging the cancellation of her OCI.
In an affidavit filed in August 2023, the union government said the allegations against Wilson were “partly based on inputs of the ministry of external affairs and security agencies/field agencies which are classified as ‘secret’ and cannot be divulged to the Petitioner”. The government requested for this information “to be placed in a sealed cover”.
Many allegations, it said, were based “on information that is available in the public domain including tweets of the Petitioner on Twitter and an article published by her”, according to the affidavit, which cites two tweets and two retweets on X (formerly Twitter), and one article written by Wilson.
One of the tweets from 2020, is connected to the launch of a report marking a year since Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood and autonomy was revoked. The article annexed is an opinion piece written by Wilson, headlined Modi’s War Against India’s Farmers, discussing the year-long farmers’ agitation against three laws Modi’s government passed in 2020.
“India’s farmer protests are mounting a major challenge to the Modi regime—and the violence deployed in response shows that the government senses the threat,” she wrote in the February 2021 article, annexed with the government affidavit.
Her petition is pending in the Delhi High Court and is listed for its next hearing on February 26.
The Govt’s Powers To Cancel OCI
In its response to our RTI, the union government cited as justification the citizenship laws’s section 7D, introduced along with other aspects such as registration, rights and renunciation of the Overseas Citizen of India card.
Section 7D of the citizenship law states that OCI cards can be cancelled if they are obtained by fraud, or if the cardholder “showed disaffection to the Constitution”, assisted an enemy during war, faced imprisonment or it was necessary to do so in the interests of sovereignty, integrity and security of India.
A challenge to section 7D was launched in the Supreme Court by a group of 80 overseas citizens of India in April 2021 questioning its Constitutional validity and the arbitrary powers it gives the union government to revoke OCI status.
The move to challenge the section came after the home ministry introduced a notification in March 2021 categorising OCIs as “foreign nationals” and imposed new restrictions, such as requiring a permit to conduct research, mountaineering, missionary, journalistic and Tablighi activities, or visit any area in India notified as “protected”.
Before that, in 2019, the union government’s contentious amendments, infusing a religious aspect to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—fast-tracking citizenship applications of non-Muslim migrants from three countries—also included an amendment to section 7D.
The amendment empowered the union government to cancel OCI cards if the cardholder “violated any of the provisions of this Act or provisions of any other law for time being in force as may be specified by the Central Government in the notification published in the Official Gazette”.
The amendment also stated that “no order under this section shall be passed unless the Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder has been given a reasonable opportunity of being heard”. The government has not yet framed rules for the CAA.
“The state wants to have the power to cancel an OCI card so that the unsupportive ones in the diaspora can be weeded out,” said Goa-based family lawyer Albertina Almeida. “It means that there is no secure contract between the OCI and the state.”
A brochure issued in July 2021 on the OCI website says that if OCI status is cancelled for any of the reasons stated, then the person concerned would also be blacklisted as well, “preventing his/her future entry into India”. The brochure does not make any mention of an appeal.
A Rising Number Of Cancellations
More than 102 OCIs could have been cancelled under section 7D between 2014 and 2023 because the first RTI—of three that we filed—was submitted in June 2023, the ministry responding by the end of August that year.
Responding to the first RTI, the ministry stated that 284,574 OCI cards were cancelled till May 2023. An appeal to the RTI response further revealed that 259,554 OCI cards were cancelled so they could be reissued, while other cards were cancelled for being lost, damaged, deceased and wrong printing.
A disaggregation of the data by year between 2014 and 2023 shows that of the 102 cancellations under Section 7D, beginning in 2020 with 37 OCI cards cancelled that year, followed by 24 cards in 2021, 31 cards in 2022 and 10 cards till May 2023, according to a second RTI filed in September, to which the ministry responded in October 2023.
We also sought details about the number of OCI cancellations between 2004 and 2014. The government’s response: the information was “not available in OCI portal”.
Article 14 also asked the union home ministry to explain how OCI cards were cancelled or reinstated under section 7D of the Citizenship Act. The response directed the answer to this query under “Useful links” on the website dedicated to OCI services.
The page links to brochures about the introduction of the OCI category, frequently asked questions, latest ministry notifications, the form for OCIs to pursue research and a comparative chart between OCI, PIO and non-resident Indians (NRIs) among other information guidelines.
While government data claimed that cancellations began in 2020, punitive action began earlier.
Punitive Action Began In 2014
The OCI status of Christine Mehta, a researcher with the advocacy group Amnesty International India, was revoked in 2014. Mehta, an American citizen, was deported after her two-year long research study between 2012 and 2014 for the international advocacy group, which reported on alleged human rights violations by security forces in Jammu and Kashmir.
In 2019, journalist and British citizen Aatish Taseer, who wrote a critical profile of Modi in TIME, received an order cancelling his OCI status because he allegedly concealed his father’s Pakistani origin.
In 2016, the union government cancelled the OCI and blacklisted the entry of Indian-American doctor Christo Philip for alleged evangelical activity.
Three years later, the Delhi High Court in 2019 restored Philip’s OCI status and said the cancellation went against the “secular values engrafted in the Constitution.
Article 14 filed a third RTI in November 2023 with the union home ministry asking for country-wise details of those whose OCI status had been cancelled and why. We will update this story if they respond .
“If we theoretically recognise that a person given some status under the citizenship act and if the state can withdraw the citizenship, then you’ve cleared the path for disenfranchising a large number of people,” said lawyer Prashant T Reddy. “What is the constitutionality of this?”
Others alleged the OCI cancellations were punitive actions against those in the Indian diaspora who were critical of Modi government policies.
“As the Indian government closes space for dissent in India, it is now looking to silence those outside of India’s borders,” said Sunita Viswanath of Hindus for Human Rights, a US-based advocacy group.
“The weaponisation of the Indian immigration system is one of the main strategies that is used to silence Indians and diaspora members,” said Viswanath. “People are being denied the chance to visit their loved ones or go back home just because of their opinions of political leaders.”
Professor’s OCI Cancelled For Tweets
In November 2020, Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Uppsala University in Sweden, received a “show-cause notice” from the Indian consulate in Stockholm, accusing him of “indulging in inflammatory speeches” and “anti-India activities”.
Swain, 58, responded to the notice that month, asking for specific instances of the alleged speeches and requested the embassy to withdraw the notice, so he could visit his ailing mother in Odisha.
Over a year later, the embassy said his response was “unsatisfactory”. A four-paragraph long order, dated February 2022, cancelled his OCI card under section 7D of the Citizenship Act.
That year, Swain challenged the government’s cancellation order in the Delhi High Court. In July 2023, the court quashed the order, pointing out that it did not provide any reason for cancelling Swain’s OCI status.
“Reasons in an order demonstrates (sic) that the order is not a result of caprice, whims or fancies and has been arrived at after considering the facts and it reflects and establishes that the decision was just,” said the high court order.
It gave the union government three weeks to “pass a detailed order giving reasons for exercising powers under Section 7D (e) of the Citizenship Act.”
On 30 July 2023, the Indian embassy in Stockholm sent Swain a more detailed cancellation order, which lists more allegations but without specifics. Swain, it said, was found “hurting religious sentiments, spreading hatred propaganda and creating rift on religion and attempting to destabilise the social fabric of India”.
The order accused Swain of “posting tweets regularly on his twitter account” and allegedly spreading propaganda “through his writing and speeches in various public forums (sic)”.
The government accused him of damaging “India’s image and institutions at international level”. The order stated that “foreign nationals” like Swain, who is a citizen of Sweden, were not entitled to fundamental rights of free speech and expression.
Swain told Article 14 that despite court intervention, the union government did not mention specific instances or evidence of alleged speeches or tweets in the July 2023 cancellation order.
“They have just elaborated the rules of the law rather than giving evidence of whether I am engaged in anti-India activities,” said Swain. “I do not go out and give speeches.”
He challenged the Centre’s second cancellation order in September 2023 in the same court. In a hearing that month, the court directed the government to file a response to Swain’s plea. The case was last heard on February 7, where the government claimed it had received inputs from security agencies which were classified as “secret” and requested the court to produce it in a sealed envelope. The next date for the hearing is May 7.
Not All Hit By OCI-Status Cancellations Live Abroad
Not all those whose OCI status has been cancelled live abroad.
In January 2024, the union home ministry sent a “show-cause notice” to French journalist and OCI holder Vanessa Dougnac because her reportage allegedly created a “biased negative perception of India”. Dougnac, a resident of India for 22 years, denied the allegations, and had till 2 February to respond.
Some others, such as Kannada actor Chetan Ahimsa, a US citizen, have faced police action for being vocal on local issues. Ahimsa was arrested twice between 2022 and 2023, following remarks on X (formerly Twitter) against a Karnataka High Court judge presiding over a case related to the hijab ban for students and for his comments on Hindutva.
Ahimsa was granted bail in both cases. In June 2022, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, Bengaluru, cited “derogatory remarks” against the judge and accused him of “promoting ill will, hatred and disharmony against particular community” among the reasons to cancel his OCI status.
He responded within the 15 days he was given, but his OCI was cancelled in March 2023.
“The show-cause notice was the extent of due process,” Ahimsa told Article 14. “The show cause and the cancellation order were identical in language. There was no response to what I wrote in my letter to them.”
Ahimsa approached the Karnataka High Court in April 2023. The union government, in its statement to the court, argued that “every country has a sovereign right to refuse entry into its territory to any individual whom it may consider undesirable”.
The government said that “OCI cardholders are foreigners and citizens of another country, they cannot claim Right to Free Speech and Movement under the Article 19 of the Indian Constitution (which guarantees free speech)”.
In April 2023, the court stayed Ahimsa’s OCI cancellation but ordered him to “delete tweets that are against judiciary and matters that are sub-judice”.
Ahimsa deleted the tweet about the judge.
“I don’t believe it is in the best interests of democracy,” he said. “But at the same time I will continue to question judgements without necessarily identifying the judge as problematic.”
Kannada actor Chetan Ahimsa’s OCI cancellation was stayed by a court on the condition he delete his tweet about the judiciary. He is a US citizen. Photo: Instagram
The Journey To Being A Pariah
Some of those we interviewed described how they came to be persona non grata for the Indian government.
Swain said he had lived in Sweden since the 1990s, engaging with Indian diplomatic officials and students. In 2015, he arranged for former President Pranab Mukherjee to speak at the university where he teaches.
The change began in 2016, he said, especially after he refused the Indian embassy’s request to organise an event around International Yoga Day at his university and wrote an opinion piece in a Swedish newspaper calling on the Swedish government to recognise the “disarmament of human rights and religious intolerance in India”.
“I was told by someone in the embassy that I should not show my face to the ambassador because of my positions against the government,” said Swain.
“Officials [in the embassy] told me that some Indians complained against me,” he said. “They were alleging that I was working against the Indian government.”
The Indian embassy in Sweden did not respond to queries Article 14 sent via email despite repeated follow-ups.
In 2019, anthropologist Angana Chatterji, an Indian citizen living in the US, testified before the US house foreign affairs committee on the status of human rights in Kashmir following the revocation of Article 370.
Before her testimony, Chatterji, who was also a part of the coalition of activists and academics that campaigned to revoke Modi’s US visa in 2005, received a call from someone she did not wish to identify, allegedly cautioning her, at the behest of Indian authorities, that they may come after her citizenship.
“In the past I have received queries indirectly asking me to stop my work to make things easier for me in India,” said Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cautioned by her lawyers against possible detention, Chatterji has avoided travelling home for a number of years. Previously subjected to alleged attempts by right-wing forces in Odisha, police in Kashmir for her work on unknown and mass graves, she alleged she continued to receive threats regularly.
The inability to return, she said, is “profoundly isolating” and makes her academic research challenging. "My work hinges on the ability to show up to bear witness,” she said. “It is an affliction to do this from afar."
‘Transnational Repression’, Misinformation Campaigns
The repercussions to the government’s critics abroad also come in the form of online misinformation campaigns.
In December 2023, the Washington Post reported how an organisation called the Disinfo Lab was run by an Indian intelligence officer, publishing dossiers on how Modi’s critics abroad were allegedly funded to undermine India.
In a flow chart published on X in February 2023, Disinfo Lab used unsubstantiated claims to link billionaire and philanthropist George Soros to various Indian-American activists, academics and human rights groups.
“My experience of being falsely labelled a 'Soros agent' is part of a larger pattern where the Indian government actively intimidates its critics abroad,” said Hindus for Human Rights’ Viswanath , who featured in the chart.
The fears of critics have also intensified since the Canadian government in September 2023 accused India of orchestrating an extraterrestrial assassination of Sikh activist Hardip Singh Nijjar.
“This is transnational repression,” said US-based Raqib Hameed Naik, an independent journalist who runs Hindutva Watch and India Hate Lab, projects tracking religious violence and hate speech in the country.
On 16 January, the Modi government had the Hindutva Watch X account blocked in India, followed by its website around 26 January, Naik said.
Since moving to the US in 2020, Naik, 29, has kept a diary to mark all the instances where he or his parents in India have received phone calls and summons from various government authorities.
Naik has counted at least 14 instances over the past three years, with the most recent being a phone call to his father on 17 December 2023 by a man who identified himself as Jammu and Kashmir police official Ghulam Mohammad Malik.
According to Naik, Malik asked his father about his American address and took the phone numbers of his mother and his three siblings.
Article 14 contacted Malik who said he called Naik’s father to conduct a “verification”. “I just wanted to ask where he is, what his family does…is he married or not and where,” he said, refusing to further comment on whether or not it had anything to do with Naik’s work as a journalist.
“The objective of the whole exercise is to put fear in your mind,” said Naik, who added he had complained to and met agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October 2023 after receiving repeated death threats.
Aside from cancelling OCI cards, some Indian origin residents of the USA and UK have been put on a blacklist and have been barred from entering the country.
Banned From India
In August 2022, journalist and US citizen Angad Singh, 30, was deported from an airport in New Delhi without explanation.
Singh, an OCI cardholder and then a senior producer at Vice News, had come to meet his grandparents in Indore. Indian immigration officials asked him a few general questions on what he did and why he was visiting the country, and then sent him back to the US on another flight scheduled a few hours after he landed.
By the time he reached his home in New York after nearly 40 hours of travelling, he was flooded with notifications on social media and was being trolled, as news of his deportation spread.
“Indian bigots online were celebrating my denial of entry with comments like ‘go back to your country’,” Singh told Article 14. “Ironically, that's the same thing racists in America would tell me when I was younger.”
Singh said he did not know why he had been deported. He sent emails and letters to the Indian consulate in New York. They were not answered, he said.
That year, he filed a plea at the Delhi High Court, after which the union government, in an affidavit filed in February 2023, said he was blacklisted in March 2021 after the consulate in New York recommended it.
The affidavit pointed to a 29-minute documentary in 2020 titled India Burning, an investigation into how “Hindu supremacism may undermine secularism and relegate India’s Muslims into second class citizens.”
The affidavit stated that the documentary “presented a very negative view of India’s secular credentials. He misrepresented facts in his visa application filed for obtaining a journalist visa in the year 2020 and has indulged in blatant anti-national propaganda to defame the country.”
Singh denied the allegations.
“The government can have any opinion it wants about my journalism,” said Singh, whose last trip to India was in January 2020, when he travelled as part of the documentary’s production crew. “But they need to substantiate it with facts if they are going to deny my rights,”
“Where are these claims of blatant anti-national propaganda coming from?” said Singh. “There is nothing incorrect about the reporting I’ve done in any capacity.”
Content creator and New Zealand citizen Karl Rock, who is married to an Indian, found out in October 2020 that he was blacklisted, when he applied for a new visa to enter India at the embassy in Dubai, according to a blog he posted on his website on 9 July 2021.
Embassy officials informed him of the ban on his entry verbally, according to Rock. Some users on social media speculated that the reason for his blacklist was a video Rock posted about participating in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. The video is no longer available on his page.
Unidentified home ministry officials told the Times of India that Rock violated the terms of his visa because he was “found doing business activities on a tourist visa”.
In July 2021, Rock’s wife petitioned the Delhi High Court and his name was taken off the blacklist, according to a blog Rock posted on 21 November 2023. It is unclear how his name was removed, but he could return to India.
Rock did not respond to questions Article 14 sent through the contact form on his website.
Blacklisted For Supporting Farmers’ Protest
In January 2023, the Indian visa application of an Indian-origin British man residing in the UK was denied twice. He travelled to India regularly and applied again, but this time directly to the Indian consulate in Birmingham.
Shortly after, he received a call for a meeting in February 2023 from an embassy official in Birmingham who did not identify himself. When he went to the embassy, the official told him that he had been allegedly blacklisted by the Indian government.
“He told me that the perception of me was that I was a mastermind. I said mastermind of what?” said the 30-year old man, who runs a family restaurant and engages in charity work for the Sikh community in the UK.
During the meeting, the embassy official repeatedly questioned the man for supporting the farmers’ protest and asked him about his views on Khalistan. The meeting lasted for a few hours and the official asked him to make a document consisting of tweets and articles where he appeared “neutral” to show authorities he was “pro-India”, the man said.
He prepared the document and sent it to the official over WhatsApp. Article 14 has viewed the document consisting of screenshots of tweets from the man’s X feed as well as the WhatsApp exchanges between them.
However, the interrogations did not end as the man was called to the Birmingham consulate at least five times throughout 2023, where conversations with officials veered further away from understanding why he was blacklisted to the proposition of him working alongside Indian authorities in the UK, he alleged.
In February 2023, two consulate officials in Birmingham, whose names Article 14 is withholding, asked him to start an organisation that would work alongside the embassy to be a “broad representation of Sikhs in the UK”, the man alleged.
In June 2023, the two officials allegedly asked him to fetch the post mortem report of a Sikh activist who died in London that summer, which he refused to do.
He was repeatedly asked about the future plans of Sikh charities in the UK that remained supportive of the Khalistan movement.
“Even if they do espouse for Khalistan, what threat does an organisation with virtually no money, virtually no members pose to the state of India,” the man said. “They’re underfunded. They are finding how to pay the next website bill.”
The Birmingham consulate did not respond to queries Article 14 sent over email despite repeated follow-ups.
The last time he met them was in October 2023 where officials told him to write directly to the Indian consulate in London to plead his case.
“They just dangled the carrot,” the British Sikh resident said. “I told them to put yourself in my shoes. Would this make me feel more Indian or less Indian? You feel othered. We hear about the atrocities of the Congress, but what about this regime? What is going on?”
Fuzzy Process Of Due Process
Experts said due process to bar a person from entering the country was not clear.
Legal experts pointed to the Foreigners Order, 1948, issued under legal aegis of the Foreigners Act 1946, which states that the union government can grant or refuse permission to enter India if “his (sic) entry is prohibited either under an order issued by a competent authority or under the specific orders of the Central government”.
A blacklist is maintained by the foreigners division of the ministry of home affairs, the Indian Express reported in 2018. It contains names of those Indian citizens and foreigners against whom a “look out circular” has been issued. Such a circular must be issued by home ministry officials of a certain rank or on orders of criminal courts.
While the names on the blacklist are not publicly revealed, it first came to attention in the 1990s when several Sikhs living abroad were denied entry into India after Operation Bluestar in 1984, the Express reported.
In 2018, the Delhi High Court ordered the ministry of external affairs to inform OCI cardholders and foreigners in advance of being blacklisted, and explain why they were denied entry. The order was put on hold by another bench of the same court the following year.
While OCI cardholders receive notices before cancellation, it is evident that those who are blacklisted do not.
(Vijayta Lalwani is a journalist covering issues related to human rights and political violence.)
Get exclusive access to new databases, expert analyses, weekly newsletters, book excerpts and new ideas on democracy, law and society in India. Subscribe to Article 14.