The Delhi High Court on Friday set aside an order of the Union government cancelling the Overseas Citizen of India card of Sweden-based professor of Indian origin Ashok Swain, Live Law reported.

Justice Sachin Dutta, however, allowed the Centre to issue a fresh show cause notice to the professor.

Overseas Citizenship of India is an immigration status that allows foreigners of Indian origin to live and work in India indefinitely.

Swain, who holds Swedish citizenship, is an academic and professor of peace and conflict research at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University.

The High Court had passed a similar judgement on July 10, 2023, and had then told the Centre to pass a detailed order explaining why it was using its powers under the Citizenship Act to cancel Swain’s Overseas Citizen of India card.

The Centre then passed another order cancelling the card, which Swain challenged again before the High Court.

The professor said in his petition that despite the High Court’s “specific and unequivocal directions” to pass a detailed order, the Embassy of India to Sweden and Latvia passed a fresh ruling in a “callous” manner. He claimed that the embassy only paraphrased legal provisions about cancelling Overseas Citizen of India cards, Live Law reported.

Swain said that he needed to visit India urgently to take care of his mother, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and other age-related ailments.

He also said that as an academician, he analyses and criticises certain policies of the current government.

“He cannot be made to suffer for his views on the policies of the government,” the petition contended, according to Live Law. “As a scholar, it is his role in the society to discuss and critique the policies of Government through his work. The Petitioner cannot be witch-hunted for his views on the political dispensation of the current government or their policies.”

The High Court reserved its verdict on the case in January. The detailed order has not been made public yet.

Also read: From India and Pakistan to Sweden, an academic’s encounters with (un)intelligence agencies