Indian-origin anti-caste activist Kshama Sawant said on Sunday that the Indian government had denied her a visa to visit her ailing mother in Bengaluru.

United States-based Sawant was an elected representative on the Seattle City Council from 2013 to 2023.

In February 2023, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination, voting on a resolution moved by Sawant.

Sawant described her visa rejection as “political retaliation by the Bharatiya Janata Party government”. She has started an online petition to protest the move.

“Modi has retaliated against other activists and journalists, denying or revoking entry into India,” Sawant pointed out, adding that her 82-year-old mother’s health was rapidly declining.

“We urge the Modi government to adopt a humane policy and urgently grant a visa for Kshama Sawant and her husband Calvin Priest to be able to travel to India to visit Kshama’s mother,” reads the petition.

Sawant has thrice been denied an India visa with no explanation, the petition said, adding that her appeal to Union Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar was also rejected.

“During that time, she passed a resolution condemning the anti-Muslim, anti-poor CAA-NRC [Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens] citizenship laws from the Modi and BJP government, and another in solidarity with the farmers’ movement against Modi’s brutal and exploitative policies,” the petition read.

In January, Swedish Indian-origin professor Ashok Swain moved the Delhi High Court seeking an early hearing of his petition challenging the cancellation of his Overseas Citizen of India status, according to The Indian Express.

Overseas Citizenship of India is an immigration status that allows foreigners of Indian origin to live and work in India indefinitely. The cancellation effectively barred him from entering the country.

Swain is a professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University.

Swain argued that his ailing 82-year-old mother, who lives alone in Odisha’s Bhubaneshwar and whom he had not been able to meet in five years, “may not survive this winter”.

The Centre had cancelled Swain’s OCI registration in July 2023 on the grounds that he had been found indulging in “illegal activities inimical” to the interests of the sovereignty, integrity and security of India.

In February 2024, Nitasha Kaul, a British writer of Indian origin and professor of politics at the University of Westminster in London, alleged that she was denied entry into the country and deported from Bengaluru airport on the orders of the Union government “for speaking on democractic and constitutional values”.

Kaul had been invited by the Congress government in Karnataka to speak at its Constitution and National Unity Convention to speak on the topic “Constitution and Democracy”. After she landed in Bengaluru, she was denied permission to leave the airport despite having a valid visa.

Kaul, an Overseas Citizen of India, is known for her criticism of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of India’s ruling BJP. In 2019, she testified before the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, highlighting human rights violations in Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, which granted special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.

In August 2022, US-based journalist Angad Singh was allegedly deported from Delhi airport when he was on the way from New York to visit his family in Punjab. In January 2023, the Centre told the Delhi High Court that Singh was blacklisted from visiting India because his documentary India Burning presented a “very negative view of India’s secular credentials”.

Singh is a US citizen and an Overseas Citizen of India.