New Delhi: The Supreme Court is likely to hear a petition filed on Congress chief Rahul Gandhi’s citizenship status next week. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had issued a notice to Gandhi asking him to clarify his position after BJP MP Subramanian Swamy claimed that a company’s record showed he held British citizenship.
The petition, filed by two socio-political activists, wants the MHA to decide questions of Gandhi’s citizenship and wants Rahul Gandhi to be disqualified from the Lok Sabha polls. It also called for deletion of his name from electoral rolls. The MHA had given two weeks to the Congress chief to reply to the notice.
Swamy had filed the original complaint in September 2017, claiming that Gandhi was director and secretary at Backops Limited, a UK-registered company. Swamy had claimed that Gandhi, in annual returns of the company filed in 2005 and 2006, had declared himself a British citizen.
Calling the Congress president a ‘man of mystery’, BJP leader Sambit Patra claimed there was no politics involved in the citizenship row. “The country wants clarification on Rahul Gandhi’s citizenship,” Patra said on Tuesday.
Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi rubbished the MHA notice to his brother and said, “The country knows Rahul Gandhi is an Indian. He was born in India and he grew up here,” she said.
The Supreme Court had dismissed a similar plea questioning Gandhi’s citizenship in 2015. A bench comprising then Chief Justice HL Dattu and Justice Amitava Roy had dismissed a plea seeking a direction to CBI to register a case against the Congress president for allegedly declaring himself as a British national before company law authorities there. The bench had questioned the "authenticity of the document" attached with the PIL and the manner in which the papers were procured.
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