MYSORE: A 75-year-old French missionary based in Kollegal will soon be deported from this land, which had been his home for 53 years, unless the President of India intervenes to help him out.
An order issued by the Centre in September 1999, which directs all foreign missionaries who have come into India after 1984, to return to their countries of origin, is behind his social affliction.
Francois Marie Godest, a missionery, had come to live in Vadkehalla, a remote village of Kollegal taluk in 1948. Once in three or four years, he would go to visit his relatives in France and return to India soon after.
The unfortunate element in his saga is that each time he returned, he came on an entry visa, which did not recognise his previous years of stay. His last trip was in 1993 which has now become the cut-off date of his entry into India. Consequently, as per the 1999 order, he is faced with deportation.
Godest also committed the mistake of not applying for Indian citizenship, an oversight which is now costing him dear. For Godest, who came to India as a young 22-year-old, identifies Vakehalla as his home.
``I am now being forced to leave the country I love and where I have lived in the service of the local people for more than half a century," he rued.
Godest and his friends in India are making an all-out last-minute efforts to get him the citizenship now. ``But the response from the authorities is not enthusiastic and essentially negative," one of Godest's friends regretted.
Godest had written to Bishop of Mysore Joseph Roy seeking his intervention, but there was no response from him. However, Father S.D. Joseph, chief of the Ambrosian Associates in Pastoral Counselling (USA Distress Cell and Director of Indian Affairs) wrote back a letter to President K. R. Narayanan, urging him to intervene and grant permanent Indian citizenship to Godest.
``I am of the opinion that such a noble soul should stay in India and make the Indian people prosper in all respects. I hope that Your Excellency will be pleased to issue a direction to the Ministry of Home Affairs to reconsider the stay of Rev. Fr. Godest," he pleaded in his letter.