7
26 October 1993
Miss Ingrid Ho
Security Branch
Government Secretariat
Hong Kong Government
Dear Ingid,
RECE
1.444
INDE
HKD 340/6.
2 9 OCT 1993
E.
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 071-
159
عانم
يل
26/10.
ETHNIC MINORITIES : INDIAN CITIZENSHIP
1.
I apologise for taking so long to let you have a substantive reply to your letter of 24 August to Debbie Barnes Jones on the rules for obtaining Indian nationality. We have now heard from New Delhi and I attach a copy of their latest letter together with copies of the Indian Citizen Act 1955 and the amended Citizenship Rules 1956.
2.
In her letter to you Debbie said that people of "Indian origin" among other categories could apply for Indian citizenship and that we were trying to obtain a definition of this term from New Delhi. You will now find this in paragraph 5 on page 3 of the 1955 Act which states that "a person shall be deemed to be of Indian origin if he, or either of his parents, or any of his grandparents, was born in undivided India".
3.
I hope that you will find the material provided by New Delhi of help. The different ways of obtaining Indian citizenship are set out in paragraphs 3, 4 and 5 of the Indian Citizenship Act 1955. New Delhi's comment about people of "Indian origin" obtaining multiple entry visas to India quite easily is also interesting. But I am not sure whether this material gets us much further forward. I imagine that your main difficulty will be to establish how many members of the ethnic indian population do meet the provisions of paragraphs 3 and 4 and of the "Indian origin" criteria in paragraph 5 of the 1955 Act. But if your records do in fact allow you to make some sort of an educated guess we would be interested to know.
eur
youre
John
J Woodrow
Hong Kong Department
indian.cit LETTERS
johnw
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