USE VISA CARD SENSIBLY
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) took a long time to
see the light, but it has finally done the right thing in removing, at least
partially, the unreasonable re-entry restriction imposed since 2009 on
foreigners with long-term Indian visas. After it came to light that David
Headley, a Pakistani-origin U.S national, had visited Mumbai on a long-term
visa several times to scout sites for the November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks,
the MHA acted in a knee-jerk fashion to ban tourists with multiple entry visas
from re-entering India within two months of leaving the country. That the
restriction did not apply to multiple entry business visas — the very visas
Headley had used for his frequent trips — was the first absurdity about the new
rule. While the restriction did nothing to deter would-be terrorists, the two
month rule affected thousands of tourists who would have wanted to use India as
a base to travel through South Asia. Most importantly, it affected
Indian-origin foreign nationals who did not have a Person of Indian Origin or
Overseas Citizen of India card. True, arrivals for 2010 were higher than for
the previous year, when in-bound tourism in India was washed out under the
combined effects of the global economic downturn and the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
But for a country trying to get more tourists to come, the restrictive rule
marked it out as one that did not follow global best practices in its visa
policy.
The government has now mercifully relaxed this
unwarranted and ineffective restriction, while retaining it for citizens of
some countries, namely Afghanistan, China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan and
Bangladesh. These are also countries whose nationals need individual security
clearance from the MHA before they can be given visas to attend conferences,
seminars or academic meetings. North Block justifies this discrimination in the
name of national security, the same alibi it invokes in order to insist that
all academic conferences where foreign scholars are invited must be officially
vetted before visa clearances are issued. This practice, which sometimes leads
to the denial of visas for scholars whose views the Indian state finds
disagreeable, is at odds with the country’s image as a vibrant democracy and
needs urgent review. Research visas for bona fide scholars are also hard to
come by, and can be impossible to obtain if the scholar wants to study a
subject that the MHA considers “sensitive.” Unreasonable visa restrictions affect
friends of India — both current and potential — more than those with evil
designs against India. They can never be a substitute for an efficient
intelligence-gathering system, which may be harder work but which would
definitely prove more fail-safe in the long run.
Prof.
John Kurakar
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