New Delhi: The Allahabad high court has dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking the revocation of former JNU student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar’s Indian citizenship.The bench comprising Justice S.K. Gupta and Justice Shamim Ahmed passed the order on a petition filed by one Nageshwar Mishra of Varanasi, according to a report in Bar and Bench.Calling the petition an attempt at gaining “cheap publicity”, the bench said that the petition had been filed “without even going through the relevant provisions of the Constitution of India and The Indian Citizenship Act, 1955.”The petitioner had sought a court direction to the government to “deprive” Kanhaiya Kumar of his Indian citizenship.Dismissing the petition, the court imposed an amount of Rs 25,000 to be deposited with the high court registry for initiating ‘frivolous’ proceedings and wasting the time of the court “which is functioning in its limited strength, during the period of the pandemic”.Also read: Allahabad High Court Sets Aside NSA Detention of Kafeel Khan“Intention of the petitioner, in our opinion, is not to espouse the interest of the public, but only of his own self, by gaining publicity. Such conduct is highly condemnable”, the order said.The petition relied on Section 10 of the Indian Citizenship Act, which lists the circumstances in which a person’s citizenship may be revoked by the central government. The bench noted that the petitioner’s reliance on the section was ‘misconceived’ as revocation under Section 10 applied only to those persons who became citizens by naturalisation or by registration, which was not applicable to Kanhaiya Kumar who was a citizen by birth.“The question of deprivation of citizenship cannot arise, merely because the Respondent No. 3 is facing Trial before the Court in Delhi on charges of allegedly raising the inflammatory slogans”, the court said and further added that the petitioner’s counsel had “neither gone through the provisions of Constitution of India nor The Indian Citizenship Act, 1955.”