Srinagar: Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani visited the regional passport office (RPO) on Friday to submit his biometric data.
While doing it, he declared himself an Indian, but soon reiterated that travelling abroad on an Indian passport was a compulsion and that he was not an Indian by birth.
“I’m not an Indian by birth. Ours’ is an occupied land and getting an Indian passport for travelling abroad is a compulsion,” he said. Officials at the RPO said that the octogenarian leader submitted his biometric data and gave his fingerprints and iris scan at the designated counter to obtain the travel document necessarily to visit his ailing daughter, Farhat Jabeen, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
He reached the RPO here at the scheduled time of his appointment at 10.15 am. Though while submitting his passport application online last month, he had, as claimed by him, left the nationality column on it blank, he mentioned “Indian” in the said column on Friday, RPO officials said. This was done by him after he was reportedly told that his application would not be processed if the nationality column was left blank.
