The question seems pretty clear. Were they Pakistani citizens, or were they born or lived permanently in what is now called Pakistan or an area controlled by Pakistan?

It sounds to me like the answer is "yes", but you don't want it to be and are looking for a loophole to get out of it...

If, instead of this question, you had a table to fill out, with Father / Mother / Paternal Grandfather etc as rows, and Name, DoB, Place of Birth, Citizenship(s) as columns, what would that table look like? Would Pakistan appear in the answers?

@André if they wanted to ask whether any parents or grandparents were Pakistani citizens, they could. But they don't, so they presumably are using the word "origin" for a reason. Citizenship is a complicated concept in the former British empire, so the reason probably has something to do with that. In any event, the precise meaning of the term in connection with an Indian visa application is very unclear to me.

@dda suppose the grandparents were born in Pakistan but left before 1940 and never acquired Pakistani citizenship. Would that count? What if they were born in England but their parents had been born in present-day Pakistan? Would it matter if they were born in Pakistan because their parents were English colonial administrators? What if they were Pakistani Hindus who later moved to India? What if their parents were French but lived in Pakistan for a couple of years? There are many possibilities where answering the question may not be so simple.

@phoog methinks you're trying too hard here. Are you a lawyer by any chance? Considering it's for an Indian visa, and the bad history between the 2 countries, it's pretty obvious that the Indian embassy wants to know whether the applicant has links to Pakistan...

For context, the reason I asked this question is because after a month long wait from assembling and filling out the painfully poorly documented set of paperwork spread across broken links on the VFS website, I received a call from the High Commission of India. The chap basically complained that I seemed too British to have answered yes to this question, but specifically he asked whether my grandfather was born before the partition (he was) and whether he moved to India after it (he joined the navy and moved to the UK, but I don’t actually know if he did so as a “Pakistani”).

I only met him a handful of times after that but I know he died in Pakistan. But did he die there as a British citizen or a person of Pakistani origin? Do I technically still have a grandparent once they’re dead? @DJClayworth what’s obvious about the definition of someone living permanently somewhere? Try looking up how tax residency testing works, and see how unreasonable it is to expect an applicant to know that with any certainty about the entire history of all their grandparents. I knew enough about him to think it was worth answering yes, but apparently the HCI wasn’t bothered enough.

Based on the above, the HCI agent advised me to apply again and answer no to this question. That in fact made me attempt the e-visa application which was then granted within 12 hours. I arrived in India this morning without issues. So it turns out answering yes to this ambiguous question cost me nearly £200 in a paper visa application I didn’t need and the journey in and out of London. Hence I think a more detailed definition for this question is due and I chose this platform to share discussion, since I’m surely far from the only British citizen to feel unsure how to answer this.

OP, you should add your last comment as an answer.

Overall I’m not surprised that a racist and xenophobic policy is highly inconsistent. Southern states in the US likewise struggled with the definition of “colored person” during the Jim Crow era

@dda no I'm not a lawyer, but I know that visa applications often include questions based closely on statutory texts (USA, I'm looking at you) and statutory texts are often written using words and phrases that are explicitly defined in the statute, or given precise definitions by judges, but that could mean any of several things in layman's terms. A lawyer would be more likely to know what "Pakistani origin" means in Indian law than most visa applicants.

And yes, the political context is clear to me, too, but I also know that, in other countries at least, making incorrect assumptions about how to answer questions on a visa application can lead to a finding of deception and a consequent inability to enter the country for ten years or even for the rest of your life. So it's better to know precisely what they mean when they say "Pakistani origin."

@deed02392 I am quite convinced that having a parent or grandparent of Pakistani origin is not a condition that ends with the parent's or grandparent's death. If your grandfather died before 1983 then he wasn't a British citizen, but he might have been a "citizen of the UK and colonies," the predecessor nationality to British citizenship (as well as a couple of other forms of British nationality).

But, to follow on from @JonathanReez's comment invoking the spectre of racism and in a fit of pessimistic cynicism, along with your experience with the high commission, my earlier unvoiced suspicion is becoming stronger, namely that whatever legal definition may or may not exist, in practice it is mostly about ancestry, and even that is probably interpreted in a discriminatory way.

@phoog yeah I suspect what they really meant is “are you Pakistani muslim?”