British Indian Academic Nitasha Kaul Barred from India
March 16, 2024
Last month, Nitasha Kaul was invited by the Karnataka state government to take part in a two-day conference on the Indian Constitution. But at Bangalore airport, she was denied entry, detained in a small room for nearly 24-hours and then put on a flight back to London.
“I was treated like a criminal,” Kaul told The Wire.
Kaul is a professor of politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, London.
She was born and raised in India, before emigrating and becoming a citizen of the United Kingdom. She is an Overseas Citizen of India and hence has the right to visit India as often as she wants.
The only explanation she got from security officials at the airport was that they were acting on the orders of the government of India. An Indian government spokesperson told the media that denying entry to a foreign national is a sovereign decision.
The Karnataka branch of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appeared to offer an explanation. In a post on X, BJP Karnataka stated that the Congress Party, which rules Karnataka, “has disgraced Indian Constitution by inviting a Pakistani sympathiser who wants India’s break up…Thanks to our security agencies, one such anti-India element was caught suspiciously entering India & detained at the airport.”
Another explanation for Kaul being denied entry into India came from the Organiser, a weekly reportedly published by the BJP and affiliated groups. A report stated that “During a US House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on South Asia Human Rights, Kaul alleged a humanitarian crisis in Kashmir, accusing the Indian state of failing to protect minorities…”
Kaul, whose family hails from Kashmir, stated at the 2019 U.S. hearing that, “I do not represent any advocacy group or lobby organisation and my views are based solely on my professional expertise, convictions, experience, and witnessing. I frequently travel to the region and have researched, published, presented and spoken about India and Kashmir for more than a decade. In fact, I do not claim to speak for the Kashmiri people, but of them, because they are my own regardless of their religious or regional identities.”
On her website, Kaul describes herself as a novelist, writer, poet, economist, politics/international relations academic, traveler, artist. She has published two novels, both about Kashmiris, Residue, 2009, and Future Tense, 2020.
Earlier she was an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan, 2010, and an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Briston Business School, 2002-2007. She earned a Joint PhD in Economics and Philosophy from the University of Hull, UK, 2003, and a BA in Economics from SRCC, Delhi University.
Kaul posted on X that the government of India “refused me entry…Unless this is fixed, I join the ranks of the Tibetan exiles and Ukrainian exiles and others throughout history who have faced the arbitrary exercise of brute unreasoning power.”
In an interview with Karan Thapar, see below, she discusses her unjust and unfair detention and deportation from India.
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