Issue passport to Indian woman of Chinese origin, Madras High Court directs MEA

Madras High Court orders Indian passport for Chinese-origin woman to visit son in New Zealand.

Convinced with the Indian nationality of a 67-year-old woman of Chinese origin, the Madras High Court has directed the Union Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to issue her a passport so that she can visit her eldest son, an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) cardholder, residing at Auckland in New Zealand.

Justice Anita Sumanth passed the orders after not finding any adverse remarks against the writ petitioner Wong Mui Cheen in a “highly confidential and secret” report submitted by central intelligence agencies to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The judge resealed the report and returned it to the Ministry.

“This court does not find any information in the Annexures (submitted by the MHA in the court in a sealed cover along with a covering letter) adverse to the interests of the writ petitioner that would come in the way of the nationality of the petitioner being confirmed, or her being issued a passport,” the judge wrote.

Representing the petitioner, senior counsel V. Prakash, assisted by Gautam S. Raman, said, the petitioner’s father Wong Tsam Cha (since dead) was born in China and had come to India to pursue his living. He had married her mother who was born in Sikkim and belonged to the Lepcha community.

Initially, the petitioner had made a wrong claim that her mother was born in Bhutan but that was corrected subsequently. Her parents had got married in Kolkata and gave birth to her on November 27, 1957. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation had issued a birth certificate to that effect on November 8, 1976.

In the 1976 birth certificate, the narration against the column Nationality/Birth identified petitioner to be a ‘Chinese Buddhist.’ Since this turned out to be a hurdle in obtaining a passport several years later, she obtained another birth certificate from the Corporation in 2013 without any such mention.

In the meantime, the petitioner married Li Wenfa in 1976 and moved to Chennai where the couple gave birth to four children. While her eldest son and the youngest daughter were now residing in New Zealand and the United Kingdom respectively, the other two children hold Indian passports, the counsel said.