Two sisters living in India’s Kerala state have been left stateless after failing to provide proof that they had renounced their Pakistani citizenship.

The News, citing BBC, reported that the sisters told a court they surrendered their Pakistani passports to the High Commission in New Delhi in 2017.

However, they said renunciation certificates were not issued because they were under 21 at the time — the minimum age required in Pakistan to formally give up citizenship.

They approached the High Commission again after turning 21, but it still refused to grant the certificate without giving any explanation, says the petitioners’ mother, Rasheeda Bano (her daughters didn’t want to speak to the media). She and her son are now Indian citizens but her daughters, she says, have been in limbo for years.

The situation, she says, has severely impacted her daughters’ lives, as they are unable to even apply for passports.

The BBC has reached out to the Pakistani High Commission in India but hasn’t received a response.

Neighbours India and Pakistan share a tense relationship which has often spilled over into hostility, like in May this year, when the countries engaged in a four-day military conflict. But migration is not uncommon, especially among members of families who ended up on different sides of the border when India was partitioned and Pakistan was created in 1947.

Over the past few decades, the process has become harder as there is much higher scrutiny of documents. As of December 2021, citizenship applications of more than 7,000 Pakistani nationals were pending with the government, according to data shared in parliament.

Bano says that when the Pakistani High Commission did not provide the renunciation certificate, she requested them to return her daughters’ passports, but this wasn’t done.

The sisters have in their possession a certificate given by the high commission in 2018 which states that they have submitted their passports and Pakistan has no objection if they are granted Indian citizenship. But Indian authorities have refused to accept this in place of a renunciation certificate, forcing the sisters to move court.

Last year, a single-judge bench of the Kerala High Court ruled in their favour, saying that it was clear that the petitioners wouldn’t be able to produce the document.

“It would be directing them to do the impossible,” the court observed, ordering the Indian government to grant them citizenship. But the federal home ministry appealed against this and on August 23 this year, a two-judge bench of the same court overturned the earlier order.

“For a person to be considered a citizen of India, they must be recognised as such by the Indian state alone, without any competing claims from another country’s government,” it said. “The formal renunciation process is the mechanism that ensures this legal clarity,” the court added. The sisters have the option to appeal against the order in a higher court.

According to Pakistan’s rules, people under the age of 21 cannot renounce their citizenship independently, but their names can be included in the renunciation application filed by their father.

The sisters’ father, Mohammed Maroof, was born in Kerala but was adopted by his grandmother after he was orphaned at the age of nine. When she migrated to Pakistan in 1977, she took him along.

Their mum Bano said her parents were also Indians but they got stuck in Pakistan while visiting relatives in 1971, after borders were shut when the two countries went to war.

Unable to return even after months, they found it easier to apply for Pakistani citizenship. She was born a few years later.

Bano and Maroof, who have four children, moved to India in 2008 on long-term visas to be closer to their “roots”. But Maroof was unable to adjust to life in India and soon returned to Pakistan.

Bano and her son, who was above 21 years of age, were eventually granted Indian citizenship.

She said the family often faced stigma when they produced their Pakistani identity documents, but at least they had something to fall back on — for the sisters even that is not an option anymore.

Simple tasks like getting a mobile phone connection, or enrolling their children in school was difficult for them, she said. Authorities eventually allowed the sisters to get an Aadhaar Card, which acts as an identity document in India. But that’s still not considered proof of citizenship, denying them basic rights.

Bano says her daughters’ lives have also been affected by the lack of passports. The husband of one of them had to leave his job in the Gulf and come to India as she couldn’t travel to him. Meanwhile, her other daughter has a son who needs medical treatment abroad but she is unable to leave India.

“The sisters didn’t get the certificate in 2017 because they were then minors. Now that they are adults, they can’t go back to Pakistan because they have surrendered their passports. So how will they get the certificate?” says their lawyer M Sasindran.

“They are stuck now”.

Originally published in The News

China on Wednesday flexed its military might as world leaders converged in Beijing for the country’s largest-ever military parade on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Victory Day, marking the victory of China in the World Anti-Fascist War.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, flanked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, termed the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation “unstoppable” as he warned warned the world was facing a choice between peace or war.

During the parade, President Xi inspected the massed troops and weaponry from an open-topped limousine down Beijing’s vast Changan Avenue before turning back to join his guests in a seating area above the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen, the entrance gate of the historic Forbidden City.

China’s huge collection of military vehicles and heavy weapons rolled past the dignitaries, while images of thousands of servicemen and women in immaculate uniforms marching in tight ranks and soldiers jumping in and out of vehicles were shown in a slick state media broadcast.

Beijing residents went out into the streets to catch a glimpse of a spectacular flypast involving scores of warplanes and helicopters, some making an “80” formation.

• Taliban govt appeals for urgent help from world after disaster.
• Afghan quake markes one of deadliest seismic event in decades. 
• Vast majority of deaths reported mountainous in Kunar province.

Hope faded Wednesday of finding survivors in the rubble of homes devastated by a powerful earthquake in eastern Afghanistan, as emergency services struggled to reach remote villages and international support began to trickle in.

China’s embassy in Afghanistan said it had extended earthquake relief aid to the country, where the Taliban government has appealed for urgent help from the world after the disaster.

A magnitude-6.0 earthquake hit the mountainous region bordering Pakistan on Sunday, leaving residents huddled in the open air for fear of powerful aftershocks and desperately trying to pull people from under flattened buildings.

The earthquake killed more than 1,400 people and injured over 3,300, Taliban authorities said, making it one of the deadliest in decades to hit the impoverished country.

The vast majority of the casualties were in Kunar province, with a dozen dead and hundreds hurt in nearby Nangarhar and Laghman provinces.

In Kunar’s Nurgal district, victims remained trapped under the rubble and were difficult to rescue, local official Ijaz Ulhaq Yaad told AFP on Wednesday.

“There are some villages which have still not received aid,” he said.

Landslides caused by the earthquake stymied access to already isolated villages.

The non-governmental group Save the Children said one of their aid teams “had to walk for 20 kilometres (12 miles) to reach villages cut off by rock falls, carrying medical equipment on their backs with the help of community members”.

The World Health Organisation warned the number of casualties from the earthquake was expected to rise, “as many remain trapped in destroyed buildings”.

‘Normalise’ survivors’ lives

In two days, the Taliban government’s defence ministry said it organised 155 helicopter flights to evacuate some 2,000 injured and their relatives to regional hospitals.

In the Mazar Dara village of Kunar, a small mobile clinic was deployed to provide emergency care to the injured, but no tents were set up to shelter survivors, an AFP correspondent said.

On Tuesday, a defence ministry commission said it had instructed “the relevant institutions to take measures in all areas to normalise the lives of the earthquake victims”, without providing further details on the plans to do so.

Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said a camp had been set up in Khas Kunar district to coordinate emergency aid, while two other centres were opened near the epicentre “to oversee the transfer of the injured, the burial of the dead, and the rescue of survivors”.

According to the United Nations, hundreds of thousands of people could be affected by the disaster.

Multiple countries have pledged assistance but NGOs and the UN have voiced alarm that funding shortfalls after massive aid cuts threaten the response in one of the poorest countries in the world.

After decades of conflict, Afghanistan is facing endemic poverty, severe drought and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbours Pakistan and Iran in the years since the Taliban takeover in 2021.

“This earthquake could not have come at a worse time,” said Jagan Chapagain, IFRC Secretary General in a statement late Tuesday.

“The disaster not only brings immediate suffering but also deepens Afghanistan’s already fragile humanitarian crisis.”