SRINAGAR: J&K and Ladakh high court sought a compliance report Friday from the Rajouri district administration on its March 25 order to reunite a Pakistan-born teenager deported after the Pahalgam terror attack with his Indian father on grounds of “sacrosanct human values and rights”.Justice MA Chowdhary’s seven-month-old order, iterated by the single-judge bench of Justice Rahul Bharti, equated the boy’s plight with the “human suffering” and estrangement caused by Partition. “The instant case stems out of this tragedy,” the court said, rejecting the Bureau of Immigration’s contention that the boy had been deported because he didn’t have an active visa.Aasim Sajjad, aka Fardin Sajjad, was born to Rajouri-based govt schoolteacher Sajjad Ahmed and a Pakistani woman, Shabnum Kouser of Rawali in Gujranwala. The marriage took place in Pakistan in Dec 2005 and Aasim was born there on Nov 26 the next year.Sajjad’s wife and son visited India in Oct 2007 on a 90-day visa, which was later extended on marital grounds until 2013. When his wife died on June 5, 2013, Ahmed sought an extension of his son’s visa, granted until April 20, 2015. He then purportedly filed repeated applications for Indian citizenship or visa extension on compassionate grounds, none of which was taken up.
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Ahmed alleged that J&K Police raided his house on April 29, 2025, took his son away in a van and deported him through the Wagah border without informing him or handing over a deportation order. The deportation came after the Union govt cancelled visas to all Pakistani citizens after the April 22 terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam and ordered them to leave.In its objections, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) argued that Ahmed didn’t “come to court with clean hands” and that his son had been staying in India without a valid visa and was legally bound to leave. The FRRO counsel said the status of the teenager’s citizenship application, which Ahmed claims to have filed, remains “not received yet” on the MHA portal.
