18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
5 Feb 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
In around 2009, Golazin Ardestani was preparing to go on stage in Tehran. The venue was sold out. She and her university classmates had been through months of rehearsals for their traditional concert and had followed all the rules: they had their songs cleared by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the lead singer was male, the musicians would be seated on the floor and everyone was dressed appropriately, including the correct hijab protocols. And yet, as Ardestani – who goes by the stage name Gola – walked towards the stage, she was told: “No, you can’t perform with them. No female musician can go on stage tonight.”
She stood at the side of the stage and watched her friends perform without her, clutching the formal permission papers which should have allowed her to sing, and which had been wilfully ignored. This is just one of the heartbreaking memories she has of being a female musician in Iran.
A few years later, Ardestani left Iran for good. Now in her 30s, she is based between Europe and the USA, where she creates music that speaks out against the regime. In 2018, she founded her own record label, Zan Recordings, so that she could finally release music on her own terms.
Ardestani was born in Isfahan, in Iran. She taught herself to yodel as a child and grew up in a house filled with a mix of the traditional Persian music favoured by her parents, and the Iranian and Western pop smuggled in by her older siblings, whose musical preferences were inspired by their desire for freedom.
“My teenage years were full of those stolen moments listening to forbidden songs on satellite,” she told Index over email. “Music, and especially female performers, gave me a sense of freedom that was completely absent on our heavily censored government TV.”
Growing up, Gola had never seen a woman on an Iranian stage. At age 19, fed up with trying to conform to traditional norms and still being prevented from singing, she joined some friends and a group of three sisters to create Iran’s first girl band, Orchid.
They wanted to challenge the narrative of female singers being “provocative”, and to resist patriarchal and authoritarian forces. Behind their music was a deep understanding of the history of Iranian music from before the Islamic revolution of 1979, when female singers like Googoosh and Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri had been celebrated and were free to perform to mixed audiences.
Orchid was only allowed to perform for female audiences, who had to remain seated. Gestures or movements that could be interpreted as dancing were strictly forbidden. The performers themselves had to avoid showing emotion on stage.
“There were female morality police at the end of each row, watching us and the audience,” Ardestani recalled.
The memory of those performances, in front of thousands of women, is still vivid.
“It was such a powerful experience that I remember making a promise to myself that night: that I would sing, I would sing solo, and I would one day sing for a mixed audience,” she said. “I held onto this vision of a day when our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons could feel proud of the women on stage.”
Whilst in Iran, Ardestani was arrested three times by the morality police, experiences which she said shaped her music and her determination to keep fighting.
The first occasion was when she was just 16, when she was arrested because her hijab wasn’t covering the front of her hair. She sat terrified in a cell and sang to distract herself. A woman shouted at her: “Shut up, close your mouth, shut your ugly voice!”
The last time she was arrested was particularly brutal and was due to the clothes she was wearing. “As they were about to push me into the van, I put on my fighting face, but chaos quickly ensued,” she said. A crowd began to form, and she hit something hard, breaking her arm. With the situation out of control, the police’s superior told her to go home in a taxi.
“All of this because of my ripped jeans, even though I was wearing a long manto [overcoat] and a scarf covering my hair.”
Ardestani considers herself lucky to have escaped alive. Under similar circumstances, Mahsa “Jina” Amini died in custody in September 2022, the moment that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
Iranian singer Golazin Ardestani demonstrating in Washington DC. Photo by Nathan Napolitano
Before leaving Iran in 2011 both to perform without persecution, and to study for a master’s in music psychology in London, Ardestani made a final attempt to plead her case and gain permission to record an album.
“I had to trick my way through the system just to get my foot in the door of the Department of Direction, where the man who granted permissions for male singers worked. But when I finally met him, he wouldn’t even look at me, staring at the floor as he spoke,” she said. She was told that Iran didn’t need a Céline Dion.
Ardestani knew then there was no coming back. “Once I started singing freely, I would lose my home forever,” she said. On the day she left, after Norouz (Persian New Year) in 2011, she decided she would dedicate everything to fighting for change.
“I promised myself that my music would carry the voices of those who can’t be heard,” she said. “There was no way for me to be fully myself as a musician, as a singer or even as a woman. They controlled every aspect of my voice, my body, my agency.”
She knows that she cannot return, and is confident that if she did, she would be arrested and charged with Mofsed fel-Arz, or “spreading corruption on earth”, due to her open challenges to what she calls Iran’s “fabricated religious theocracy”. This charge could carry a death sentence.
The songs she has finally had the freedom to create include Haghame, meaning “It’s My Right”, which is about the freedom to choose whether or not to wear the hijab. Another, Khodavande Shoma, translates to “Your God”, and includes the lyrics: “Your god is sick, it seems – a sick, dangerous criminal. Your religious beliefs, death, and destruction. Your prayers are for murder and blood.”
For female musicians in Iran, freedom is still out of reach. Many women rely on underground scenes, Ardestani told Index, but this comes with its own risks. Posting performances on social media can also lead to arrests, intimidation and the charge of Mofsed fel-Arz.
And censorship does not always respect borders. At a concert in Canada in 2023, designed to support the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Ardestani was told she could not sing Khodavande Shoma, because the organisers believed it was “attacking people’s religion”. This, she said, is not what the song is about. Rather she is “confronting the twisted version of religion that the Islamic regime has created”.
“I am an Iranian woman fighting for freedom and, specifically, for women’s freedom of choice and speech. Yet here I was, outside of Iran, being told by an organiser – of a concert for freedom, no less – that I couldn’t sing a song in a free country,” she said.
She told the male Iranian organisers that she would sing that song, or not sing at all. They relented.
For every performance Ardestani gives, another song in Iran is silenced. She often posts on social media about the plight of imprisoned Iranian musicians. She condemned the arrest of Zara Esmaeili, who often sang covers of international pop hits in public with her hair uncovered. One social media video showed Esmaeili performing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. She was arrested on 25 July 2024, and it is believed that she has not been heard from since.
Ardestani is a huge admirer of Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who won an Index Freedom of Expression Award in 2023. He was first arrested in 2022, and after being detained multiple times and tortured, he was charged with “corruption on earth”, jailed and given the death sentence. The death sentence was dropped after campaigning from prominent musicians and human rights organisations including Index, and Salehi was released in early December.
“It’s unimaginable that a musician, simply expressing himself through lyrics, could be sentenced to death for his art,” Ardestani said. “Iranian music is powerful and resilient; it’s the heartbeat of a people who have been silenced in many other ways. Each song is a form of resistance, a declaration of our existence and our hope.”
As to why Salehi and other musicians are targeted, she has a strong theory: “They know the power of a good song, the potential of meaningful lyrics and the way music can unite people to inspire change.”
For Ardestani now, everything is about fighting for freedom for all – not just in Iran, but globally. She describes music as a way to transform personal struggles into a collective moment. In another of her songs, Betars Az Man, or Fear Me, she sings:
“The butterfly is fleeing its cocoon.
Fear me, as I am that butterfly.
Fear me, as freedom is my voice.”
In her upcoming song Zaloo, she says she will offer her vision for ending theocracy in Iran – a musical call to action. For Ardestani, music is a form of rebellion. And as she told Index, far from being afraid herself: “Those who wish to silence me should be the ones who are afraid.”
See also: Science in Iran: A catalyst for corruption
28 Jan 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
After three years of Taliban rule, nobody really believed women could be erased further from public life in Afghanistan.
“But the Taliban found another way: they’ve restricted our voices and faces,” said Maryam, an Afghan legal scholar and journalist.
Maryam, who uses a pseudonym, was referring to the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws, which were passed in August and ban women from speaking, singing or showing their faces in public. If women break the rules, they – or their male relatives – face imprisonment.
Maryam spoke to Index in hushed tones over Signal from the relative safety of her living room in Afghanistan.
The new laws typify the rapid intensification of the Taliban’s crackdown, which has already seen women banned from parks, workplaces, schools and universities since it took power in August 2021. Once implemented monthly, harsh laws, decrees, house raids and arrests are now a daily occurrence.
“It’s a very intense attack on the dignity of humans and the dignity of women,” said Shaharzad Akbar, executive director of Afghan rights group Rawadari. “Before, there was some wiggle room, but it’s very scary because now it’s law, it’s out there and people are required to comply with it.”
The crackdown isn’t manifesting just through new laws.
“The Taliban have also been destroying institutions and putting new institutions in place to actually implement and carry out their vision of society,” said Akbar. She should know, having chaired the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission before it was abruptly dismantled when the Taliban toppled Kabul.
At that time, Maryam was on the cusp of completing her legal training, having graduated from university, and working as an assistant lawyer in the country’s courts, often assisting on highly sensitive divorce and domestic violence cases that drew the ire of Taliban members.
After the takeover, the Taliban closed the country’s only bar association. All existing licences to practise law were revoked, putting lawyers out of work. Many like Maryam, who were still waiting for their licences to be formally approved, never received their documentation. As the Taliban filled the Ministry of Justice and the courts with its own lawyers, judges and prosecutors, Maryam’s chances of a legal career vanished.
Maryam was just a toddler when the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Now 26 years old, she finds it hard speaking about the early “bad days” after the Taliban’s recent return to power and the subsequent unravelling of decades of progress on women’s rights.
She has relatives – mostly judges and their immediate families – who have managed to leave the country. Yet, like many Afghans, she’s not been deemed enough “at risk” to warrant evacuation. Instead, she’s focused on doing what she can while living under the constant threat of Taliban restrictions.
Through word of mouth, she established a homeschool teaching English to girls in her neighbourhood. It was one of the many underground schools that proliferated across Afghanistan after September 2021 when the Taliban issued a ban on girls over the age of 11 attending secondary school.
However, as rumours swirled about the rising number of secret schools, the authorities began doing door-to-door searches. She received messages over Telegram from Taliban fighters warning that she’d be thrown into jail if she didn’t stop “working against the regime”.
Maryam said she had no choice but to close the school.
“We already were in danger because of the position of my family in the justice system,” she said. “I didn’t want to make more danger for myself, my family or my students.”
In December 2022, the Taliban banned all Afghan women from attending university. Maryam’s husband, an engineer, was teaching at a local university, and he was devastated that his female students were being forced to give up their studies.
Under the most recent law, he faces losing his job if he leaves work to accompany Maryam anywhere. Without him, she’s forbidden from leaving the house.
The Taliban has created hundreds of positions for men to teach in gender-segregated religious schools – madrassas – across the country, while women with university degrees and teaching experience are forced to stay at home.
Rawadari – one of the few organisations that has maintained a network on the ground documenting violations of civil and political rights since the takeover – has been closely following the detrimental impact of the education ban on women’s and girls’ mental health across Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The overwhelming sense of ‘hopelessness’ is undeniable, said Akbar, who now lives in the UK in exile but still finds reports of what’s happening back home extremely difficult to hear.
“I think most of the girls believed this will be temporary and never imagined they would experience what their mothers had experienced,” she said. “They are depressed and they’re struggling to keep their hopes alive.”
Maryam continues to battle her own mental health struggles as a result of the restrictions, but has found some solace in working in the shadows as an online educator, mental health trainer, journalist and advocate.
However, as the internet and social media platforms are increasingly monitored by the Taliban and its spies, she has had to be more careful about her online interactions.
“I can’t trust who is safe and who is not,” she said. “There are women on Instagram and other places who are looking for women who are disobeying Taliban rule. For that reason, I don’t share anything about myself. They just hear my voice and the teachings I’m offering them. I’m scared and my colleagues are scared, but we go forward, do the job and provide teaching for those who need it.”
Unsilenced in exile
There is also growing momentum from Afghan women internationally to give their sisters inside the country a voice. One such woman is Qazi Marzia Babakarkhail, who became a judge in Afghanistan at 26 – the same age that Maryam is now.
Babakarkhail worked in the family courts, later setting up a small shelter for divorced women in Afghanistan and a school for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Those initiatives were a lifeline to dozens of women, but they soon drew unwanted attention from the Taliban and she fled the country in 2008 after two assassination attempts.
Since moving to the UK, Babakarkhail has learnt English and now works as a caseworker for an MP near Manchester. As well as helping campaign for the evacuation of hundreds of female judges, she speaks daily to former colleagues and friends still trapped in Afghanistan.
Her advocacy earned her an invitation to an all-Afghan women’s summit held in Tirana, Albania, in September. It was the first time since the Taliban regained power that such a large group of Afghan women – more than 100 from across Europe, the USA, Canada and Afghanistan itself – had been given an international platform to discuss the rollback of women’s rights. They are so often excluded from conversations on Afghanistan’s future.
This marked a sharp contrast with a UN meeting held earlier in June in Doha, which was heavily criticised for inviting Taliban leaders and neglecting to bring Afghan women’s voices to the table.
Babakarkhail said the summit had opened ‘a new window of hope’ for Afghan women. Seeing women who defied the Taliban travel to Tirana reminded her of her own perilous journey and gave her hope for Afghanistan’s future.
“They are real activists because they are still fighting and still stay in Afghanistan,” she said. “Of course they do a lot of things silently, but they will go back. They know how to deal with the Taliban and they will keep silent. They made us proud.”
She is hopeful the summit – which discussed the unravelling human rights situation, the urgent need for humanitarian aid and international recognition of the Taliban’s mistreatment of women as “gender apartheid” – will provide the necessary wake-up call to the international community.
“We don’t want the United Nations or other countries to recognise the Taliban as a government,” she said. “This group is a stand against the Taliban and a stand for people in Afghanistan.”
Pushing for accountability
The international push for accountability, both at the International Criminal Court – which has an ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan – and the groundbreaking move to bring a gender persecution case against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – are other signs that the dial may finally be shifting in Afghan women’s favour.
Akbar has been one of the leading voices campaigning to bring the case to the ICJ. Although she is appalled by what is happening to her motherland, she believes these judicial measures and the summit in Tirana will help ensure Afghan women’s voices are no longer silenced.
“We have a saying in Farsi,” said Akbar. “We say, ‘Drop by drop, you make a river.’ All of this will come together to become this river of hope and this river of defiance against the Taliban. The dream really is that we show the Taliban that the power of people everywhere in the world is with the women of Afghanistan and not with them.”
For Maryam, such developments are already reviving dreams that Afghan women’s rights and freedoms will one day be restored.
“I know that the suffering that women are enduring under the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime is unique,” she said.
She hopes the ongoing efforts, both by women like her inside the country and by those elsewhere in the world, will be enough.
“We are motivating and inspiring each other. We will win and the future will be ours – women’s.”
17 Oct 2024 | Canada, India, News and features, Volume 53.01 Spring 2024
This article was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of Index on Censorship. We are republishing it here after Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of making a “horrific mistake” in violating Canadian sovereignty at an inquiry into the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Last June, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh activist campaigning for Khalistan, a separate homeland for his co-religionists, was shot dead in British Columbia, Canada.
The murder happened in a car park, and a video emerged of his body collapsed over the steering wheel. Three months later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government was involved in the murder. India reacted angrily, terming Trudeau’s charge “absurd”. India removed diplomats from Canada, asked Canada to reduce its diplomatic presence in India, and significantly delayed Canadian visa applications. The USA, Canada’s closest ally, expressed concern but did not say more.
In recent years, India’s strategic importance has increased for three reasons: its growing economy, its outwardly democratic credentials and its potential emergence as the counterweight to China – not only in Asia but on the international stage.
Western governments have been queuing up to invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit their countries and rolling out the red carpet for him, or they’ve been visiting India and announcing investment deals – even if actual inflows may be puny compared with the bombastic claims.
Sikhs and India
Sikhs form about 2% of India’s population, and most of them live in the fertile and prosperous state of Punjab along with Hindus, Muslims and others. In the early-1970s, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a political party representing Sikh and Punjabi interests, passed a resolution seeking greater autonomy. By the late 1970s, a militant movement emerged, seeking an independent homeland called Khalistan, carved out of India.
Extremists representing Khalistani interests attacked government targets and terrorised civilians. Many militants garrisoned themselves in the holiest Sikh shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and in June 1984 then prime minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into the temple to eliminate the threat.
Hundreds died in what became known as Operation Bluestar. Four months later, on 31 October, Gandhi was assassinated by two of her bodyguards – both Sikh. In the retaliatory violence that followed, thousands of Sikhs were killed in northern India.
Indian security forces pursued the militants ruthlessly, and the Khalistan movement subsided. It survives among Sikhs abroad who dream of an independent Sikh nation, but in India there is little support for Sikh separatism.
However, Sikhs overseas and in India remember the attack on the Golden Temple, the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984 and the lack of justice. While Indian leaders have since expressed regret over the violence, and a Sikh economist – Manmohan Singh – was India’s prime minister from 2004 until 2014, the wounds have not healed. That accounts for the nostalgic longing for an independent homeland among some Sikhs abroad.
Nijjar’s killing would have remained largely forgotten, but in November the USA charged an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, with attempting to hire an assassin to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader who is the general counsel for Sikhs for Justice and who lives in the USA. Gupta, the USA alleged, was acting under the directions of an Indian government official and had offered $100,000 to a potential assassin.
He did not know that the man he was trying to hire was, in fact, a US agent, and Gupta is now in a Czech jail, awaiting extradition to the USA.
While the Indian government denied any role, its response to the US charge was more muted and less full of bluster than its response to Trudeau. US President Joe Biden was invited as the guest of honour to India’s day of pomp and glory – the Republic Day parade – in January this year. Biden did not make the trip and while he did not give any specific reason, diplomatic circles believe it was meant as a snub to India, which has elections later this year. The incumbent Modi would have loved the footage of Biden by his side, watching the might of India’s defence forces marching by.
There is no evidence of India’s role in either Nijjar’s murder or the plot against Pannun, and they could just as easily have been rogue operations. But the US charge-sheet is fairly detailed, and India’s subdued response raises questions. India’s current government has long admired the long reach of Israel’s Mossad, which has a record of carrying out spectacular attacks against those Israel considers its enemies.
Could some Indian officials have been tempted to imitate Israel as a form of flattery?
Transnational repression
Carrying out violent acts against individuals or organisations that a government considers hostile to its interests in a friendly country is an extreme form of transnational repression. But India has practised many other subtler forms of preventing contact between Indian dissidents seeking a global platform and foreign researchers or journalists wishing to report on India. It has expelled journalists, prevented academics from entering the country, stopped its own journalists or human rights activists from travel and got Indian embassies to complain loudly against foreign reporting of India.
Most recently, Vanessa Dougnac, who had been the longest-staying foreign correspondent in India, said she would leave the country after India revoked her status as an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI). (She is married to an Indian national, and so qualifies for such a status.) The title is misleading: OCI does not grant any citizenship rights such as the right to vote, but it grants the individual a permanent, long-stay visa and the ability to work (except in certain sectors). Dougnac was told her reporting for various French publications created a “biased, negative” perception of India. She wrote a heartfelt lament while leaving the country she considers her own, saying the government’s onerous conditions made it impossible for her to work there.
Earlier, the overseas citizenship of Ashok Swain, who teaches peace and conflict studies at Uppsala University in Sweden, was revoked. In November 2020, Swain was informed his OCI would be revoked because of his “inflammatory speeches” and “anti-India activities”. Swain asked for specific instances and requested for the decision to be overturned so he could visit his unwell mother back in India. His request was denied.
Swain sued the government, and in July 2023 the court ruled in his favour, saying the government needed to provide proper reasons. Later that month, the Indian embassy in Stockholm sent him another note, long on rhetoric and short on specifics, saying he was “hurting religious sentiments”, “destabilising” India’s social fabric and “spreading hate propaganda”. Swain was tweeting too much and too critically about India, the order said, hurting the country’s image abroad. Swain’s case will be heard in May.
The OCI status was created not as a right but as a privilege or an entitlement, because people of Indian origin who lived abroad had been clamouring for dual nationality, which Indian laws don’t permit. It was created in 2005 under the 1955 Citizenship Act, which allows foreign citizens of Indian origin or foreigners married to Indian citizens to enter the country without a visa and reside, work and hold property there, among other benefits.
But lately the government is wary of OCI journalists and academics visiting or living in the country, especially if the government does not like their reporting or investigations. In March 2021, India required OCIs to seek a permit to conduct research, for mountaineering, for missionary, journalistic or Tablighi (a Muslim sect) activities, or to visit any area of India deemed as “protected”.
According to the human rights and law-focused web portal Article 14, which has examined the issue in great detail, more than 4.5 million people around the world are OCIs, and data released by the government in response to an inquiry under India’s Right to Information Act, showed that the Modi administration had cancelled at least 102 OCI cards between 2014 and May 2023. In theory, those whose OCIs are cancelled can apply for a regular visa to visit India, but the government reserves the right to blacklist them which would, in effect, bar them forever from entering the country.
In November 2022, 82-year-old UK-based activist Amrit Wilson received a letter that tore to shreds her official ties with India. The letter, from the Indian high commission, blamed her for “anti-India activities” and for making “detrimental propaganda” which was “inimical” to India’s sovereignty and integrity. There was, of course, no evidence – but she was asked to provide reasons within a fortnight why her status should not be revoked. Wilson sent a detailed response, but several months later the government replied that her response wasn’t “plausible”, and cancelled her status. She is now appealing through the Indian court system. In its response, the government pointed out some of her tweets for being critical of the government and an article that opposed the revoking of the special status granted to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The government claims it can cancel the status of those who have shown “disaffection to the constitution” or “assisted an enemy during war”, or done anything that it believes is against the interests of “sovereignty, integrity and security” of India.
Chetan Ahimsa (Kumar), a leading actor in Kannada films, had his status revoked briefly, too. Ahimsa is a US citizen. He was arrested in India after he criticised a ban on Muslim students wearing the hijab in schools in the southern state of Karnataka. In court, the government said India could expel people who were “undesirable” and foreigners did not have the right to free speech in India. The court stayed the cancellation.
More famously, in 2019, the USA-based writer Aatish Taseer, whose mother is the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and whose father is the slain Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, had his overseas citizenship cancelled after he wrote a cover story in Time magazine asking if India could survive another five years of Modi.
In Taseer’s case, the government claimed his status was revoked because he had “concealed” the fact that his father was a Pakistani national. Earlier, in 2014, Christine Mehta, a researcher at Amnesty International, had her OCI revoked after she studied India’s human rights record in Jammu and Kashmir.
A gigantic conspiracy?
A web-based portal called Disinfo Lab has, according to a report in The Washington Post, been compiling information of critics overseas, Indian or not, and blaming them for undermining India. The portal establishes links between the critics and the philanthropic billionaire George Soros, sometimes by connecting disconnected dots, to present an image of a gigantic conspiracy.
At the same time, foreign-based web portals critical of India are being taken offline inside the country. The latest to suffer such erasure is Hindutva Watch, which compiled human rights violations by Hindu fundamentalists. India has escalated demands on X, formerly Twitter, and many accounts critical of the government have been “withheld” recently, including those operated by foreigners who live abroad. X has complied, but issued a statement expressing disapproval of the government’s action. Clearly, X’s owner Elon Musk, who claims to champion free speech, has a different standard for different countries, and in the Indian case, he has meekly complied with many requests.
Academics are also being turned away. Within weeks of Modi’s election in 2014, Penny Vera-Sanso, of Birkbeck University in London, who had been visiting India since 1990 and writes about gender, was denied entry. In 2022, Lindsay Bremner, who teaches architecture at the University of Westminster, had a valid research visa when she arrived in India, but was told at the airport that she could not enter. Earlier that year, Flippo Osella, who teaches anthropology at the University of Sussex, was sent back. He is an expert on Kerala and has been visiting India for 30 years. The government claimed his research on caste was deemed “sensitive”. Osella understands Malayalam and has studied the Ezhava community. He has written about Mamootty, a popular actor in Kerala, and was working with local institutions on predicting weather. His research was supported by the UK government, but he was treated brusquely and not allowed to contact friends in India.
India has also barred writers and academics who have tourist visas but who might conduct research, which would technically violate Indian rules. In 2018, Kathryn Hummel, an Australian poet, was turned away at Bangalore airport and Pakistani researcher Annie Zaman was similarly sent back and prevented from attending a conference in Delhi. When I sought out some of the academics denied entry, none of them wanted to speak, on or off the record, because they did not wish to jeopardise their visas in the future. Some American journalists, Indian origin or otherwise, too have had visa requests delayed or denied.
When graduate students and academics at several US universities organised a three-day conference in 2021 called Dismantling Global Hindutva, which examined the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and its effects on Indian society, several academics and potential speakers were warned off from participating, and a few backed out, so as not to jeopardise future visits to India. Indian residents in the USA who support the Indian government wrote to faculty heads and university administrators complaining against those academics. Academics in the USA who are of Indian origin and are critical of India have frequently been targeted by concerted efforts from pro-government overseas Indians, calling for their dismissal or for them to be disciplined.
Several journalists and human rights activists living in India find themselves mired in legal cases, which means they must have clearance from courts or other appropriate authorities before leaving the country. This has prevented several writers and human rights activists from participating at events overseas.
Others with clean records also find that they are suspect. Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Kashmiri photojournalist whose photographs earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, was prevented from leaving for Paris to launch a book featuring her work, even though she had a valid French visa.
India is erecting a barrier between scholars and their subjects, reporters and their stories, and closing off doors and windows, narrowing Indian minds and hardening outlooks.
And it flexes its muscles abroad, shouting at critics, preventing their travel and access, and – if the Canadian and US accusations are true – attempting to eliminate those it disagrees with.
But it will hold elections in a few months, and encomiums praising the world’s largest democracy will follow. Naturally.
