Although this article was published on the above named blog in October 2005, it is no longer accessible (last checked: 05/12/2018). Thus I am reproducing it here:
An open letter to Shri Manmohan Singh - Prime Minister of India
...and an attempt to invoke the conscience of the world's media
This is a monologue of a British Muslim journalist of Kashmiri origin, who the tortuous Indian visa authorities in London and Islamabad have driven to monomania.
Visa Application Details:
London 08/04/05 : No:747
Islamabad 28/04/05: No: F-00415 and 30629 (Grandmother)
The first week of April this year witnessed what many people over the world considered to be the first tangible breakthrough in 57 years between India and Pakistan in the form of the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad Bus Service, linking disputed and divided Kashmir, hitherto hermetically sealed. The very same week, an announcement was made that flights from Britain to India were being doubled, to meet the demand fuelled by an historically unprecedented number of visitors from the UK to the sub-continent.
That week also corresponded with my Naana (maternal grandfather) agreeing after a seventeen-year voracious struggle on my part, to take my Muslim Naani (maternal grandmother) from Pakistani-administered Kashmr (PAK) to Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK) to visit her Hindu siblings, separated since the bloody partition of 1947.
Please refer to my BBC article for the full story, which can be found at the following link:
On the surface, achieving this objective of family re-union appeared as feasible as never imagined before, or so I thought! Today is the 7th of September and I am nowhere nearer ‘nirvana’ than I was in that first week of April.
My Naana, who specifically made the trip from the UK to Pakistan in April, just as I did, has returned despondent. Whereas I, rather less pragmatic than he perhaps, have remained here, effectively ‘setting fire to my ship’ and vowing not to return to the UK until I fulfil my quest.
Mr. Singh, I write this letter to you with great anger and exasperation (albeit condensed) at the way in which your consulates in London and particularly Islamabad have blocked and even mocked my attempt. For example, Mr. Naidu, a visa official in London, when asked whether he acknowledged the human need for family reunion exclaimed, “We Indians are not human when it comes to issuing visas!” Mr.Sunil in Islamabad, laughed out loud when I asked him to imagine himself in the predicament that I found myself in. The head of your visa section in Islamabad, Mr. Deepak Kaul conversed with me as if he were a potentate giving orders to a deferential subject. Now these are the very institutions that act as your interface to the outside world.
My dilemma is compounded when I hear widely-held rumours around your Islamabad embassy of an informal exchange of RS:5000 (c.£45) ensuring a speedy visa process. It gets more comical when I notice the promptness with which this consulate issues visas to members or friends of the Awami National Party (ANP) of Pakistan’s NWFP province, a party I come to understand, was against the partitioning of India in 1947.
If it’s of any solace to you, I feel the pain of partition (even though I was born 25 years later!). Having crafted two nation-states over the blood and bones of millions who perished in that ignominy, communal parochialism continued to define your mutually destructive strategic stance against one another. If you had both remained intact, you would have soon come to realise the folly of dismantling a centuries old co-existence with superficial borders. Crucially, both of you would have refrained from using Kashmir as a playground for your war games and one-upmanship. In short, without partition there wouldn’t have been a Kashmir issue.
Having witnessed at first-hand the terror and turmoil of partition and coming from a jovial community full of zest as you do, you would and should recognise the pain that my grandmother’s family are going through, ruefully, your bureaucracy hasn’t. I sense an air of petty vindictiveness if not rancour which your consular services apportion to those from (PAK), most of whom have little say in the goings on in the sub-continent. For that very reason, many of them make no mention of Kashmir when applying for an Indian visa.
I have thought long and hard as to why your visa authorities have created obstacles, being led to run in circles for five months does that to you! Maybe it's because they see me as young and impressionable. Perhaps, the plethora of road-blocks, a multitude of check-posts littered every few kilometres, frequent crackdown operations, which foment terror and cause resentment amongst civilians, would make me realise that a whole nation was living in an army cantonment.
Well, I already know. I've been there in 1989 when I met my grandmother’s family. It is their love and hospitality towards me, sheer yearning for their sister, which has troubled me incessantly for seventeen years. When finally, circumstances appeared favourable in me quelling this dilemma, your bureaucrats has proved to be the proverbial 'bone in the kebab', throwing ‘water over my aspirations’.
This leads me to the question of nationality and freedom of movement. If British citizens wishing to travel to India and Indians (including those from IAK) wishing to travel to Pakistan are granted visas within half-an-hour, why has your consular service forced me to make applications in both the UK and Pakistan? Initially promising me a visa upon producing a fax from India to confirm that I have relatives there, then instructing me to make a second application in Islamabad where initially I am told it would take 2 months to process, that my application would be sent to London for verification, following which your staff in London in turn inform me that they haven’t received anything. The embassy in Islamabad then sticks to a line of, “This case is with the home affairs ministry in Delhi, we are waiting for their decision, it could take up to 18 months”.
The fact that your ambassador in Islamabad Mr. Menon has reneged on a promise to hear me out has left me all at sea. Even those Pakistanis holding high office that enjoy fruitful relations with their counterparts in India have ashamedly been bereft of moral initiative.
Since the Muzzafarabad-Srinagar Bus service started, roughly 20,000 people have applied from (PAK) to visit their relatives on the other side of the divide. So far in five months only about 600 have managed to travel (the bulk of them by jumping the queue). Furthermore, the majority of people in Kashmir that have separated families since 1947, live in the Jammu/Mirpur/Kotli/Rajouri region, travelling on the above-mentioned bus service involves a circuitous journey. Opening routes in these regions was more urgent, however, despite pledges by both India and Pakistan to facilitate this, nothing appears imminent.
The only solution is to apply for Indian citizenship I deduct. After all, having British and Pakistani nationality while being born in a disputed territory is simply not enough! It shouldn’t be a problem because you grant citizenship through ancestry. My paternal grandfather sweated out most of his working life in Mumbai.
While I don’t hold you personally responsible, in fact I have great hope in your ability to appease, but this is the picture that I’m getting of India vis a vis the common citizen of Kashmir. I am confident that you will look into this issue and hopefully make clear: what is India’s policy with regards to allowing Kashmiris from (PAK) to India, because your embassy in Islamabad sure as hell won’t.
My letter to you is much less an expose than a means to address an issue, which has had scant exposure in the media. For all your emphasis of ‘people to people contact’ and ‘facilitating the creative energies of the Kashmiri people’, these aspirations have not yet filtered down to the common man.
Meanwhile, I intend to pursue my mission by putting ‘pen to paper’ and ‘mouth to microphone’. This has become my ‘Dharam-Yudh’. I’ve had to re-structure my life, forego my family/friends and promising media career in Britain to brave the heat, dust, insects and ‘shark-infested waters of the Indian sub-continent’. For the sake of maintaining two overly conscious nation states, India and Pakistan have been guilty of making the whole region’s population endure enormous sacrifices.
It may take an intrepid Kashmiri who came from Britain to try and repay an iota of love received from his grandmother in his formative years, to be used as a case study to understand the futility of borders amongst identical people. Restricting people’s movement thereby exacerbating human suffering gives weight to Nietzsche’s theory of patriotism and nationalism emanating from sickness and unreason, acting as the strongest force against culture. Maintaining these borders will be tantamount to blocking means of peaceful change. It hurts to not be able sit in a car and drive from Lahore to Delhi if one wished or Mirpur to Jammu for that matter. I really fail to see any valid reason as to why that is not possible. It’s a sick feeling that ensues when despite modern transport, one can’t travel a few kilometres based on a bureaucratic whim.
The very idea of Hindus and Muslims being separate nations is repugnant and almost as ridiculous as suggesting Jews and Muslims must cut each other off from one another. The goodwill that had been built up over centuries has faced a tough test post world war two. The advent of nation states has created many barriers for the movement of people. In the case of India and Pakistan, I would urge you both to confederate and leave the Kashmiris to pick up the broken pieces of what has undoubtedly proven to be the most bloodiest and mind-shattering period in it’s history. Furthermore, making any decision on the future of Kashmir would be premature without allowing a period of time for Kashmiris to re-live the experience of a borderless society sans military presence.
I realise that many Indians have traditionally balked at the mere mention of Kashmir but I am confident that despite my bitter experience of the past five months that significant progress will be made during your tenure. It’s changing the old mindset of your bureaucracy, which I see as the major challenge.
With spirituality being prominent in the East, you’d be well accustomed with the notion that the worst possible thing for one’s spirituality is the quest for vengeance. In that respect, I don’t seek revenge. In fact the hatred that I’ve endured from your bureaucracy, I intend to defeat with love. People can’t necessary change governments or power structures but they can work on people’s hearts. Nevertheless, my emotions over the past five months have transformed me into a weird combination of a pensive 1950’s Guru Dutt and the forever-angry 1970’s Amitabh Bachchan.
Coming to the issue of compensation, the world we live in today is an increasingly costly one. Most people in today’s world are pursuing economic prosperity while desperately trying to keep their income above their expenditure. Pakistan is hardly an exception. Your Visa Officer in London Mr. AK Kotha assured me I would obtain a visa subject to receipt of a fax from India from my relations. I APPLIED FOR A VISA ONLY AFTER OUTLINING MY REASON FOR TRAVELLING TO INDIA IN VERY CLEAR AND CONCISE TERMS.
Thus, as a resource-less man, my only means of assistance at the moment is borrowing. As people working for your government are wholly responsible for my predicament, I can only hold you responsible ( unless you want to get the particular culprits to dig out of their own pockets ). It’s just as well that I lead a frugal existence. So far, a conservative estimate would be £10,000 (UK sterling). Needless to say, the longer this issue drags on the more determined and desperate I will become, not to mention those I am borrowing from.
In all that has taken place since 1947, the Kashmiri public has been the first to lose out and the last to benefit. Kashmir shouldn’t be a hostage to the relationship between India and Pakistan. There are positive signs that you and your counterpart over the border realise that.
Finally, if my grandmother or her siblings die while I wait for a visa, who am I to blame? How will I reason with myself? What future hope will there be for people to address their issues and achieve their objectives through peaceful means?
Despite coming across numerous hurdles, I will staunchly maintain the peace and patience route despite the exigency of this issue, but what would others do if faced with a similar dilemma?
Feedback and suggestions to:
sahaafi@gmail.com
This letter addressed to Manmohan Singh has been handed over to Pakistan Foreign Minister: Kasuri and Indian Ambassador Islamabad: Menon, at an inauguration ceremony of the South Asia Free Media Association, on Wednesday the 7th of September 2005 evening by yours truly.
A redacted version of this letter was also published on the opinion pages of the English daily 'Pakistan Post' on Wednesday the 19th of October 2005.
