25 September 2004	Saturday	09 Shaban 1425

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ISLAMABAD, Sept 24: The government on Friday awarded citizenship to Indian woman Hafsa Aman to enable her to live with her Pakistani husband, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao told Dawn.

The minister said the citizenship was granted after she fulfilled the requirement of the interior ministry (documentation). Meanwhile, an official of the interior ministry said: "Although the Indian woman had moved the High Court for seeking Pakistani nationality, the decision for granting her citizenship was made at very high-level."

The interior ministry had earlier refused the citizenship to the Indian woman, who had converted to Islam to marry the Pakistani man with whom she had fallen in love while studying at a university in Ukraine.

The announcement about the grant of citizenship coincided with the first meeting of President Gen Pervez Musharraf with India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York.

Hafsa Aman, 25, a physician, had been facing deportation since March 2004, when Pakistan rejected her request to remain with her husband, Aman Khan, also 25. The woman had embraced Islam in 2003, a year after she met Khan in Ukraine.

Authorities in March had asked her to leave Pakistan because her visa had expired. But she refused to go back to India, and filed a petition in the Peshawar High Court requesting that she should be allowed to live in Pakistan. The woman had also appealed to President Musharraf to allow her to live with her husband and their baby who was born last month.

Hafsa Aman welcomed the decision and told the local press that she would withdraw the petition from the court when a judge would take up her case on Sept 30. "I am grateful to the government of Pakistan for allowing me to live with my husband and baby in Pakistan as its citizen," she said.

"I will spend all my life in Pakistan. I will live here, I will die here." Her husband also thanked the government and said the decision would help improve relations between Pakistan and India.

Meanwhile, an official in the interior ministry told Dawn that not only Indian, but woman of any other country who married to a Pakistani man could get the country's citizenship provided she met all the requirements and follow the official procedure.

"In this category, women have to stay regularly one year in Pakistan," he said. But, according to the government rules, any Indian man married with Pakistani woman could not get Pakistani nationality.