India strips British Modi critic of overseas citizenship

NEW DELHI: An Indian-origin British journalist critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lost his Indian overseas citizenship, a move campaigners said underlined the government’s hostility to a free press.

The home ministry said Thursday that Aatish Taseer had “concealed the fact that his late father was of Pakistani origin” and was therefore ineligible for Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). Taseer’s cover article on Time magazine’s international edition titled “India’s Divider in Chief” — next to Modi’s face — was published in May ahead of elections that saw Modi win a second term in a landslide.

The writer’s father Salman Taseer was born in pre-partition British India and was governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province until his assassination in 2011 for opposing the country’s blasphemy laws. Born in Britain, Aatish Taseer wrote on Time’s website late Thursday that he lived in India from the age of two with his Indian mother — his sole legal guardian — and had no contact with his father until he was 21.