- Tuesday, April 29, 2025
By: indiaweekly.biz Staff
INDIAN authorities have asked a Polish student of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, to leave the country after he participated in a rally against its new citizenship law.
The Foreigner Regional Registration Office in West Bengal’s capital city served a notice to Kamil Siedcynski, a comparative literature student, “asking him to leave the country within a fortnight… for conduct deemed inappropriate for a foreign national staying in India on a student visa”.
The incident comes close on the heels of a Bangladeshi student of Visva Bharati University being issued a similar directive by the FRRO after she posted photographs of an anti-CAA demonstration on social media.
A varsity source said several teachers and Left-leaning students were of the view that Siedcynski was paying the price for attending an anti-CAA rally in December last year, when a Bengali daily interviewed him and published a articles based on his comments.
“Someone probably forwarded a copy of the report to the FRRO,” said the source. “Siedcynski’s enthusiasm to attend the protest rally and click photographs landed him in trouble.”
Recently, Afsara Anika Meem, a first-year Bangladeshi undergraduate student in the Fine Arts department of the Visva-Bharati University was served an FRRO notice for allegedly engaging in “anti-government” activities.
Both the foreign nationals have reportedly requested the FRRO to reconsider its decision and promised not to get involved in any such protests in the future.
The FRRO, in turn, has said that a final decision will be taken in Delhi, the source said quoting the two students.
Siedcynski, who was supposed to write his third-semester examinations this year, could not be contacted.
Jadavpur University vice-chancellor Suranjan Das and registrar Snehamanju Basu did not answer phone calls.
