We still lick western boots

Headley haunts visa watch
- Clampdown by Indians after uncomfortable questions
K.P. NAYAR

Washington, Dec. 20: If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or BJP parliamentary party chairman L.K. Advani were US citizens and were to apply for a visa to travel to New Delhi now, they would in all probability be refused permission to visit India.

The reason: both of them were born in what is now Pakistan, never mind if they are not Pakistanis or have had no ties with Pakistan for decades since they emigrated to the US or anywhere else in the West.

Typically locking the stable doors after the horses have bolted, a near-total ban has been imposed on Americans born in what is now Pakistan getting visas from India.

Such draconian steps will not prevent another David Coleman Headley from obtaining an Indian visa at the Indian embassy here or at Indian consulates in the US.

Shashi Tharoor, the minister of state for external affairs, told reporters in New Delhi yesterday that Headley “is an American citizen born in Washington. It would have been unusual for us to deny him a visa. So he got a visa.”

But the minister’s explanation does not exonerate the Indian consulate in Chicago which issued Headley’s multiple entry visa or excuse the systems and checks that made it possible.

Americans who apply for an Indian visa are required right at the top of their application forms to state their names at birth.

Headley’s name at birth — Gilani — was a dead giveaway. Not only because the Prime Minister of Pakistan is a Gilani or because Headley, as it turns out, is half brother of the Prime Minister’s public relations officer, Danyal Gilani, but because Gilani is a common enough name across the border to have aroused the suspicions of consular officials in Chicago.

Besides, on the second page of the Indian visa form, an applicant is required to fill in his father’s name and nationality.

In Headley’s case, the answers respectively would have been: Syed Saleem Gilani and Pakistan.

If Headley’s name at birth did not alert those who processed his visa application, the father’s name and nationality certainly should have been cause for a second look and a reference to the Union home ministry in India for clearance.

Had the consular officials in Chicago been attentive and Headley’s application referred to New Delhi, it is more or less certain that he would not have been cleared by the Union home ministry.

This is because Syed Saleem Gilani was a Pakistani journalist and was fairly well-known in India in his time as a broadcaster for Voice of America. In the Indira Gandhi era, the US government-run radio service was considered by India’s Left-of-Centre politicians as a front for the CIA.

In the Indian system, there are special procedures for clearing the visa applications of Pakistanis who have media links and, more often than not, their applications for Indian visas are denied.

Although Headley was not a journalist, the extensive scrutiny of his father that a North Block search would have entailed may have led officials in New Delhi to an alert about Headley’s drug convictions: a definite visa denial in that case.

There is intense co-operation between India and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — for which Headley is believed to have worked as a double agent. The DEA even has a bureau at the US embassy in New Delhi, which would have given information about Headley, if only his visa application had been referred from Chicago to New Delhi.

But more important now than the route that his visa form took is this question: if consular officials in Chicago had been more alert, would it have made any difference to the plot for the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai? That question demands an answer.

A sommelier in a watering hole, patronised by officials of the Indian embassy here, Indian journalists and visitors from India on state business, recently applied for a visa to go to New Delhi.

He is a US citizen, who considers himself Indian because when he was born, there was no Pakistan although the place of his birth is now in Pakistan.

This man has never been a Pakistani citizen because his family left for the US when he was young.

But when his application reached the desk of a visa officer here, the man was called, accused of hiding on the application form the fact that he was a Pakistani, and blacklisted by the Indian mission.

The poor man’s plea that he was Indian at the time of his birth and that he had little to do with Pakistan cut no ice with those processing his visa application.

If that was the innocent sommelier’s experience, was it really because of an oversight in Chicago that Headley’s application — that too for multiple visits to India — was so easily cleared?

Did it have anything to do with the fact that Headley was actually working undercover for Americans when he went to India, and did the Americans have anything to do with the ease with which he got his visa?

Did the Americans want Headley to visit India so that his credibility with his Pakistani minders would go up? These are questions to which answers would hopefully be found once Headley’s visa application is probed in New Delhi.

Since October 1, 2007, applications for Indian visas issued by the embassy here and the four Indian consulates in the US — including Chicago — have been handled by Travisa Outsourcing, an American company owned by a one-time refugee from Prague, Jan Dvorak.


Habits die hard.
We had become so used to British Slavery when we licked their boots that now, even 60years after independence we have not got out of the habit.
That would only explain why we become flustered and start wagging our tails and bluttering out all insensible things in their presence. And they make the best use of the fluster.

When any American wants to come to India, we become so excited, thinking only of the dollars he will bring in that we forget all rules.

The Americans throw a dollar here and a dollar there and we keep wagging our tails and run round them in circles.

Those who have visited any tourist places must have seen those sights where touts run after them offering them all sorts of wares in their broken English.

I suppose, the same happens in the consular offices when any American goes to ask for visa.
The visa is granted post haste - no questions asked. We fear that if we ask too many questions they may go off to Thailand or Malaysia with their dollars.
All rules are given a go-by.

Our security is useless and can be broken at will by any terrorists since we fear antagonising the minorities.

It is a fact that they were just 10 % after independence but now constitute 25 % of the population in many areas, either by breeding or cross border infiltration.
This 25 % of the population is responsible for more than 90% of the crime committed in India.
I know this is unpleasant and I will be branded communal.
However, it is a fact and in the privacy of their homes our corrupt politicians too admitt it but they are not willing to say it in public because they fear losing the minority votes.
Unless the administration becomes secular and takes decisions irrespective of vote bank, our countries security will always be in danger.
There will be many more Headleys and Ranas.