Delhi denies visa to CAA critic Indian-American Kshama Sawant
New Delhi: The Indian consulate has denied a visa to Indian American leader Kshama Sawant, a former Seattle City Council member, preventing her from visiting her ailing 82-year-old mother in India.
According to Kashmir Media Service, the rejection is reportedly due to her opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
Sawant expressed her frustration on social media, revealing that her visa had been denied three times.
“My husband and I are at the Indian consulate in Seattle. They granted him an emergency visa due to my mother’s serious illness but rejected mine, stating that my name is on a ‘reject list’ without providing any explanation. We are refusing to leave, and they are threatening to call the police on us,” she wrote on X.
In a follow-up post, Sawant claimed that a consular officer explicitly linked the visa denial to her being on the Modi government’s “reject list.”
“It’s obvious why. My socialist City Council office passed a resolution condemning Modi’s anti-Muslim, anti-poor CAA-NRC citizenship law. We also achieved a historic victory by banning caste discrimination,” she stated.
In February 2020, the Seattle Council, one of the most powerful city councils in the US, unanimously passed a resolution condemning the India Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It was Sawant who had introduced the resolution in the Council at a time when massive protests were going on across India against the controversial citizenship law.
The resolution had asked the Indian Parliament to repeal the amended law and stop the National Register of Citizens and asked India to uphold the Constitution and take steps towards helping refugees by ratifying various United Nations treaties.
