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The Madras High Court on Wednesday asked the Indian government to allow the teenage daughter of a couple jailed near Chennai for their role in the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to visit India to meet her mother.

A division bench of Chief Justice AP Shah and Justice K Chandru upheld a writ petition filed by Nalini, the mother of 14-year-old Megara who lives in Colombo, and directed New Delhi to issue her entry permit within four weeks.

Megara was born in a Tamil Nadu prison to Nalini and Sriharan alias Murugan, an operative of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), following their arrests shortly after the May 1991 assassination of Gandhi.

Nalini, an Indian Tamil unlike Murugan who is a Sri Lankan Tamil, had been urging the Indian government to issue the daughter visa to come to India to meet her but the request was repeatedly turned down.

Nalini had appealed against the order of Justice Prabha Sridevan of the high court who on October 31, 2006 had turned down her plea to grant visa to Megara.

Allowing the appeal, the division bench said on Wednesday: "Under Section 9(2) of the Citizenship Act, 1995, the appellant's daughter, as a citizen of India, is entitled to enter the country."

However, the court left the issue of Megara's citizenship to be decided by the government.

"It is open for the union government to decide the issue of cessation of the citizenship in accordance with the provisions of Section 9(2) of the Citizenship Act," it ruled.

Nalini, presently lodged in the Vellore Central Prison near Chennai, had undertaken fast on several occasions insisting on her daughter's right to enter India after the Indian high commission in Colombo rejected Megara's request.

It seemed to be a lost cause after Justice Sridevan dismissed Nalini's plea that her daughter should be allowed to study in Chennai.

In her writ appeal, admitted Dec 20, Nalini pointed out that as she is an Indian citizen and Megara was born in India, her daughter could not be refused visa to travel to India.

Nalini argued that it was Megara's birthright to continue her studies in Chennai.

Megara was born Jan 21, 1992 in the Vellore Central Prison. She was then sent to live with her grandparents in Sri Lanka as her parents (Nalini and Murugan) faced an uncertain future. In January 1998, Nalini and Murugan were sentenced to death.

At that juncture, Rajiv Gandhi's widow Sonia Gandhi intervened, now the Congress chief, requested the Indian president to commute Nalini's death sentence to life imprisonment on humanitarian grounds.

Expecting that Nalini would be released soon, Megara's family has decided that the teenager should be given a chance to be with her mother.

Murugan is a death row prisoner whose appeal for clemency is pending before the president.