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Govt, Opposition, NGOs up the
pressure on Black List issue
WSN Bureau
 PUNJAB:
After years of virtual and illegally imposed exile on hundreds of
Sikh youth, pressure seems to be building up on the Indian
Government to review the ridiculously named "Black List" of
non-resident Sikhs who have no criminal record but whom New Delhi
has not allowed for years to return to India, citing frivolous
grounds, but mostly without citing any grounds at all.
Even Chief
Minister Parkash Singh Badal has repeatedly talked about this, so
has
India's former Minority Commission's Chairperson Tarlochan Singh.
Former Indian Prime Minister IK Gujral has often taken up the cause,
and India's ex-envoy to UK Kuldip Nayar, a known voice of sanity in
Indian media, keeps underlining the issue.
But now, the
outcry at the sheer illegality of the Black List has reached such a
crescendo that even Congress MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira recently wrote
to the Center to scrap or review the Black List. He cited specific
cases where people were being discriminated against.
So much so that
even the
Punjab state unit of right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP has now made
it clear that it wants the Black List to be thrown in the trash bin.
For the record, the Punjab
government has requested the Centre to review the ‘blacklist’ and
allow those without any criminal record access to India.
Incidentally, in most cases, the criminal record is widely known to
be cooked up local police stations known for corruption.
Punjab made the
request at a meeting of the inter-ministerial committee looking into
problems of NRIs in Delhi on Wednesday.
Punjab's
secretary, NRI affairs, A.S. Chhatwal, said the state government
wanted that a more lenient view needed to be taken on the issue of
blacklist. He said the Union government had agreed to consider the
issue in view of peace in the state.
Punjab BJP
president Rajinder Bhandari had also condemned the Black List after
a visit to Canada. The BJP
has claimed that during the UPA rule, a large number of NRI Sikhs,
who had been allowed travel despite figuring in the blacklist
earlier, were being denied it.
It is now
believed that the blacklist has been stuffed with more than 700
names. Most of those whose names figure in the blacklist reside in
the UK,
Canada and the US.
16
July, 2008
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