Scottish Greens Visa Row: NUS Chief Quit, Other Student MSP Elected

Two Indian-origin Scottish Green Party candidates went into the May 7 Holyrood vote on student visas. One sits as a Member of the Scottish Parliament for Edinburgh and Lothians East. The other, Sai Shraddha Suresh Viswanathan, says a party official phoned her in July 2025 and told her to step down because of the same kind of visa.

The party denies blocking anyone, saying candidates manage their own eligibility. The law they were managing against had been rewritten months earlier to make the eligibility threshold lower than the advice apparently demanded.

The Discrepancy at the Center of the Row

She ranked third on the party’s North East Scotland regional list during candidate selections in 2025, a place high enough to have a real chance of a seat had the Greens performed in the region the way they did nationally. She told BBC Scotland she was advised by a party official in a July 2025 phone call to withdraw, with the reasoning that her visa might not see out a full five-year MSP term. She stepped down.

Q Manivannan, who took third place on the Edinburgh and Lothians East Green list, did not withdraw. They sat through nominations on the same kind of permission, a student visa attached to a PhD at the University of St Andrews. When the votes were counted on May 8, the Edinburgh MSP was returned as one of two openly transgender candidates elected to Holyrood, alongside fellow Green Iris Duane.

The contradiction is what the NUS Scotland president now wants explained. She told the broadcaster there had been “a discrepancy in how different candidates have been advised by the party” and that the withdrawal had taken “a significant toll on her health and well-being.” The party says no candidate was blocked. Both statements can be true only if “advised to withdraw” and “blocked” are different categories of pressure.

The chronology is short:

1. 2025: Internal candidate ranking places her third on the North East regional list.
2. July 2025: Phone call from a party official advises withdrawal over visa term length.
3. May 7, 2026: Holyrood election conducted across eight regions.
4. May 8, 2026: Result confirms a new Green MSP for Edinburgh and Lothians East.

How Scottish Law Changed Who Can Stand

Two pieces of Scottish legislation drew the eligibility map the party was working from this cycle. They each widened the door. They left one question untouched: what happens if an MSP’s permission to remain runs out mid-term.

The 2020 Threshold

The Scottish Elections (Franchise and Representation) Act 2020 first opened candidacy beyond British and qualifying Commonwealth citizens. Foreign nationals with indefinite leave to remain, and EU citizens with pre-settled or settled status, became eligible to stand for the Scottish Parliament. Time-limited leave, including student visas, was still outside the door.

The 2025 Broadening

Five years later, the Scottish Elections (Representation and Reform) Act 2025 extended candidacy to “any foreign national with any form of leave to remain, whether limited or indefinite,” according to immigration law site Free Movement. That captured graduate visas, work visas, and student visas. The reform did not require that the leave cover the full parliamentary term. It did not require a route to settlement either. The eligibility test became whether a candidate held some form of leave on nomination day and was resident in the United Kingdom.

The Five-Year Term Question

What the reform did not resolve is what happens to a sitting MSP whose leave expires. The Scotland Act 1998 still disqualifies a person if they cease to hold leave to remain. That clause sits in tension with the new candidacy threshold: a candidate can legitimately stand on a one-year student visa, win, and then be disqualified months later if a follow-on visa does not come through. The party had to decide internally how much weight to give that risk when ranking candidates on regional lists. It decided differently for two candidates with similar paperwork.

What the Scottish Greens Have Said

The party’s formal position is short. A spokesperson told BBC Scotland that candidates carry the eligibility burden themselves, and that nobody had been blocked because of their visa.

Candidates are responsible for ensuring they meet all legal and eligibility requirements before standing for election, including any matters relating to their own visa status. We cannot comment on individual candidates or internal selection processes, but we can confirm that nobody has been blocked from standing for the Scottish Greens because of their visa status.

The statement does not address the timing question raised by the former candidate. She says the phone call amounted to direction, not information. The party’s framing puts the responsibility back on the candidate, which is correct as a matter of electoral law, but does not engage with the allegation that internal advice was applied differently to two candidates with similar legal positions.

A separate party line, on the new MSP’s situation, did engage with the term-length question. The party told reporters that the MSP “is on a valid visa with the right to work and live in Scotland, and is a Commonwealth citizen.” Commonwealth citizenship matters because Commonwealth nationals resident in the UK have long had broader political rights than other foreign nationals. The former candidate, also a Commonwealth citizen by virtue of Indian nationality, did not have the same line offered on her behalf.

Two Candidates, Two Paths Through One Rulebook

The clearest way to see what the row is about is to lay the two candidates’ positions side by side.

Two differences sit outside the table. The first is regional list strength: the party won far more list seats this cycle than in any previous one, including its first constituency seats in Glasgow Southside and Edinburgh Central. Had the former candidate stayed on her list, her election would have depended on the same list arithmetic that returned the Edinburgh MSP from third place. The second is that the new MSP had publicly disclosed a graduate-visa fundraising effort before the vote, signalling a route to staying past the student visa’s expiry. Whether a comparable route was discussed in the phone call has not been disclosed by either side.

Viswanathan’s Withdrawal and Its Cost

The former candidate is not a fringe figure in Scottish student politics. She took office as NUS Scotland’s first international student president in July 2024 for a two-year term, originally from Kerala and previously vice-president for welfare at the Aberdeen University Students’ Association. She had also won the Young Scot Health and Wellbeing Award before stepping into the union role.

Her platform for the union year was built around protecting education funding and rebuilding what she called a “representative and supportive” student movement, with explicit weight on international students inside that frame. Standing for the Scottish Parliament was an extension of that platform, not a sideline.

The personal cost she described is what her allegation pivots on. She told the BBC the withdrawal had taken “a significant toll” on her health and well-being, a phrasing she chose carefully and has not retracted. She also said she was “thrilled” that fellow party members had been elected, a deliberate signal that she is not running an anti-party line.

That distinction matters for what comes next. A current student-movement president who walked away from a winnable list slot, on her party’s advice, in a year that party broke records, is not a story resolvable by repeating the stock line. The candidate she would have stood beside on the regional list is a public fact. The internal advice she received is not.

Manivannan’s Visa and the Home Office Question

The new MSP was sworn in on a student visa attached to ongoing PhD studies at the University of St Andrews, where the candidacy has run since September 2021. The party has said publicly that the MSP is fundraising for a graduate visa to bridge the gap when the student visa expires. ITV News reported on May 12 that the Home Office had been urged to investigate the eligibility question, with critics arguing that the parliamentary salary alters the work-permission picture.

That last point is technically resolved. Standing for, or sitting in, a devolved legislature has been excluded from employment restrictions in the Immigration Rules since October 2022, a carve-out that lets a student-visa holder draw the MSP salary without breaching visa conditions. The bigger risk is timing: the student visa has a finite expiry, the graduate-visa application has to land before that date, and any gap is a disqualifying gap under the Scotland Act 1998’s disqualification clause.

If the graduate visa comes through, the row over the new MSP’s eligibility quiets and the former candidate’s complaint sharpens, because the worked example will show that a student-visa MSP can in fact serve. If it does not come through, the party’s caution toward the former candidate starts to look retrospectively reasonable, though it would still leave the discrepancy in advice unexplained. Either way the timeline is short. PhD-linked student visas typically expire within months of viva completion, making this autumn the earliest plausible pressure point.

What Selection Committees Now Have to Decide

The party’s biggest-ever Scottish election result, 15 seats, gives it more list-allocation choices in 2030 than it has ever had. It also gives the next selection cycle a precedent neither candidate asked for: a sitting MSP elected on a student visa, and a former candidate who says she was advised out of the race on similar paperwork.

Two things sit on the desk of whoever runs the next selection. The first is whether the party will issue written guidance to migrant candidates that matches the 2025 statute, rather than relying on phone-call discretion. The former candidate’s complaint is essentially that the discretion was applied unequally, not that the law was misread.

The second is what happens to a winning candidate who later loses leave. The Scotland Act 1998 disqualification clause is untouched by the reform, and a parliamentary arithmetic that depends on one MSP whose visa is up for renewal is a problem this caucus has not had to solve before.

If the graduate visa is granted before this autumn and the Home Office query closes without action, the row reads as proof of concept for the 2025 reform and an unforced error inside one party’s selection process. If either step slips, the same statute starts looking like a door opened wider than the system behind it was ready to handle.