New Delhi, Dec. 27: A new fee regime introduced by the Narendra Modi government for foreigners seeking Indian citizenship has sparked charges of religious discrimination for seeking a 100 times lower payment from select communities than from others.

The home ministry, in rules notified last Friday, declared that Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan eligible for Indian citizenship will need to pay Rs 100 with their application.

Other applicants will need to pay Rs 10,000 if they apply in India and Rs 15,000 if they apply through Indian missions abroad.

Till Friday, all applicants for naturalised citizenship - independent of their country, region or community - needed to pay Rs 15,000.

Over 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils living legally in India will need to pay Rs 10,000 if they apply for citizenship here, as will over 100 members of the Ahmediya community from Pakistan seeking Indian nationality. Over the past six years, Shias in Pakistan have increasingly come under attack from militia groups - and some have sought Indian citizenship.

Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar - where they are treated on a par with illegal Bangladeshi migrants - will need to pay the higher differential fee if they apply for Indian citizenship.

Tibetan refugees - who number over 94,000 in India - will have to pay the higher fee.

"When you do not charge different visa fees from people based on their religion, how can you discriminate between them on fees for citizenship?" asked Chaudhry Maqbool Ahmed, an Indian Ahmediya community leader, in an interview to The Telegraph. "This is absolutely wrong."

Ahmed knows the struggle for citizenship well. His wife Tahira was a Pakistani national when she moved to the tiny Ahmediya hamlet of Qadian in Indian Punjab in the mid-2000s on a visa to live with her husband. But even after Tahira met all the criteria needed for a naturalised citizenship, it was years before she finally received her Indian citizenship last year. She paid Rs 15,000.

Over the final two years of Tahira's journey to Indian citizenship, India's own approach to the award of its nationality has changed.

Modi, ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, had said he would make India a home for victimised Hindus everywhere. In September 2015, the home ministry issued a notification allowing Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Parsis from Pakistan and Bangladesh who were in India to legally stay as long as they wanted, without worrying about the validity of their visas or foreign passports.

That notification also selectively paved the way for these communities to apply for citizenship - India's citizenship law forbids the grant of nationality to an applicant living in the country illegally.

The new fee rules represent a challenge to the concept of a country uniformly welcoming to refugees and immigrants, said experts.

"This is very problematic," Paula Banerjee, one of India's foremost scholars on the country's history with refugees, and a professor at Calcutta University, told this newspaper. "It may also, I would argue, possibly be unconstitutional."