Airport officials detained reporter David Barsamian for 54 hours in Delhi, until a flight back to the U.S. was available. Barsamian said he was under constant surveillance during his detention. “I would get up to go to the bathroom, someone else would come with me. It was a very Kafkaesque situation,” he stated.
NEW YORK – A veteran U.S. radio broadcaster was barred from entering India Sept. 23, ahead of his Oct. 2 interview with political activist Binayak Sen.
David Barsamian, founder and director of the Boulder, Colorado-based Alternative Radio which offers its programming on public radio stations throughout the country, believes he was primarily denied entry because of his previous reporting from Kashmir.
“India has developed an extreme sensitivity about the discussion of Kashmir to the point of paranoia,” Barsamian told India-West by phone from Boulder. “India wants to control the narrative and control the information flow about the most densely-populated military zone in the world,” he said.
Upon arriving at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, Barsamian, who had traveled to India on a tourist visa, said he gave his passport to the immigration counter and was told to wait. Several immigration officers then took him to a separate room.
“They were friendly to me because I could speak some Hindi,” said Barsamian, who lived in India in the late 1960s while learning to play the sitar and estimates that he has returned to the country at least 30 times since then. “They told me, ‘looks like you’re going back on the same flight you landed on,’ and waved a piece of paper at me which said the word banned,” reported Barsamian.
Airport officials detained Barsamian for 54 hours in Delhi, until a flight back to the U.S. was available. Barsamian said he was under constant surveillance during his detention. “I would get up to go to the bathroom, someone else would come with me. It was a very Kafkaesque situation,” he stated.
In the three weeks since his banishment from India, the recipient of several journalism awards – who was once named a ‘media hero’ by the Institute for Alternative Journalism – said he has not been contacted by the Indian government as to why he was banned, and does not know whether the ban is temporary or permanent.
Barsamian said he intended to travel to Srinagar to uncover the issue of mass graves in Northern Kashmir. The Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission recently released the report, “Inquiry Report of Unmarked Graves in North Kashmir,” confirming the presence of 2,156 unidentified bodies at 38 different sites in four districts in the region.
Kashmiri activists have long accused Indian military forces of staging fake encounters with civilians and killing them while claiming they are militants.
At press time, the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. had not returned calls or e-mails for comment on the matter. Several Indian newspapers have said that Barsamian was travelling on a tourist visa, instead of a journalist visa.
A notification on the Indian Embassy’s Web site states, “Journalists, Editors/Writers of television networks and radio stations traveling to India on work or vacation are required to apply (for a J visa) with…a document from their organization describing clearly the nature of their work and whether they are traveling on work or as tourists.”
Barsamian said he has traveled to India many times on a tourist visa and never been previously detained.
“The world’s greatest democracy is turning into a totalitarian state,” asserted Barsamian, adding that airport officials knew about his upcoming interview with Binayak Sen, 61, who was jailed for several years and accused of sedition for his work in upholding the land rights of tribal people.
Balaji Narasimhan, an engineer who is active with the Binayak Sen campaign, told India-West, “What we see in David’s case is a pattern of intimidation and harassment of human rights workers and journalists, people who are independent witnesses to the abuses of the Indian government.”
“Alternative Radio has a huge audience all over the U.S.,” said Narasimhan. “This situation deprives us of an opportunity to hear the voice of Binayak Sen and about the work he has done,” he said.
An online petition, signed by more than 100 academics, writers and others, is being circulated online to garner support for Barsamian’s plight.
