The Madras High Court on Wednesday sought the response of the Centre to a public interest litigation petition filed by a 25-year-old woman lawyer from Andhra Pradesh to cancel the Indian citizenship of a self-proclaimed animal rights activist S. Muralidharan, who migrated to Chennai from Sri Lanka in 1983.
A Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Krishnan Ramasamy directed Senior Central Government Standing Counsel K. Venkataswamy Babu to take notices on behalf of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs as well as the Ministry of External Affairs. They also ordered notice to Mr. Muralidharan, returnable by April 22.
The orders were passed after senior counsel AR.L. Sundaresan, representing the PIL petitioner Mandalapu Sandhya of Nellore, claimed that the citizenship obtained on the ground of marrying an Indian citizen was invalid since the activist had overstayed in the country and was also not in possession of a valid foreign passport while making his application.
In her affidavit, the litigant said she was shocked to come across social media posts of Mr. Muralidhar who had denigrated almost all acclaimed animal rights activists in the country by calling them names and denouncing the work done by them. He had not spared even former Union Minister Maneka Gandhi.
The petitioner’s lawyer was also equally shocked by his supposed claim that commercial exploitation of animals, in events such as circus, would actually prevent them from extinction and that he was responsible for gathering protesters in favour of jallikattu in 2017. She also accused him of soliciting funds from people for INCARE, a NGO, run by him.
A deeper probe into his background by the petitioner revealed that he was born at Kandy in Sri Lanka in 1969 and migrated to India in 1983. After completing his school and collegiate education in Chennai, he got employed in New Delhi in 1994, when he was issued an Indian passport after cancellation of his Sri Lankan passport.
Thereafter, he shifted to Chennai and married an Indian citizen in 1996. When his Indian passport expired in 2004, the Regional Passport Officer here refused to renew it. Hence, Mr. Muralidharan filed a writ petition in the High Court in 2007 and obtained an order from a single judge in 2014 to consider granting him citizenship on the ground of having married an Indian citizen and residing here for long.
