An Indian American ex-councillor who had campaigned against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act has been twice denied an Indian visa, preventing her from visiting her ailing mother in Bengaluru.

Kshama Sawant, former Seattle City Council member, has alleged “political retaliation” by the Narendra Modi government and is exploring the possibility of a legal challenge.

Sawant said she had been trying to visit India since May last year. Her mother Vasundhara Ramanujam, 82, has been unwell for the past two years.

Sawant said her application for an e-visa was rejected on May 29. She applied the following month, to be turned down again, she said.

In June last year, she wrote to Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar but there was no response.

On January 9 this year, Sawant and her husband Calvin Priest applied for an emergency entry visa with the consulate-general of India in Seattle “on account of my mother’s declining health”.

They attached a letter from a doctor at the Cratis Hospital in Bengaluru who has been treating Sawant’s mother.

“We were told at that time that we could expect a response within one or two days,” Sawant wrote in an email response toThe Telegraph.

“After a week of receiving no response to our emergency entry visa application, Calvin and I went to the Consulate-General of India in Seattle and met with the Consul Officer in Charge, Mr Suresh Kumar Sharma, and asked him why we had not received any response toour application.”

She added: “To date, there has been no response to our emergency entryvisa application.”

As part of the emergency visa application, the consulate-general took the couple’s passports. They are yet to get the passports back.

Asked what reason she could think of for the visa denial, Sawant wrote that it could be “a political rejection”.

“There seems to be no other plausible explanation at this point than a political rejection by the BJP government,” she wrote.

“If the Modi government wants to claim that denying me a visa is not a matter of political retaliation against me, then they have a straightforward way of proving it — by urgently granting me a visa so that I can see my sick mother.”

The external affairs ministry does not usually comment on visa applications, maintaining it is a sovereign State function.

Sawant’s friends have launched an online petition urging the Indian government to stop retaliating against activists by denying them visas.

Sawant had introduced a resolution in the Seattle council in 2020 urging the Indian government to repeal the CAA and stop the proposed update of the National Register for Citizens, arguing these were discriminatory against minorities. The resolution was passed.

In February 2023, Sawant introduced in the council an ordinance against caste discrimination in Seattle City. This was passed, too.

“In February 2020, we won a resolution condemning the anti-Muslim, anti-poor CAA NRC citizenship laws from the Modi and BJP government in India,” Sawant wrote to this newspaper.

“Modi’s Indian Consulate of San Francisco sent a letter to the City Council opposing my resolution. We also faced opposition from many US-based right-wing Hindutva and Modi supporters.”