by Meena Menon
Travelling outside Islamabad was not even an option. I kept up a flow of applications to visit places. After some months, the external publicity officer in charge of our visas and also our point of contact in Pakistan, snapped at me, ‘Why are you making so many applications when your visa itself may not be renewed?’ It was the first indication that my stay here would not be for long. That was the other thing about the visa: it was not renewed after the initial three-month period. I was told by the suave and helpful officials at the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi that my three-month visit visa would be changed to a journalist’s visa once I got there. Nothing of the sort happened. As with visas, so it was with identity cards which were issued for three months provisionally. The first visa extension happened three months after the expiry and in the second instance, it was never renewed. We were given visas for a few days in May 2014 to leave Islamabad. The concession was that I was allowed to travel home via Karachi to Mumbai.
That was the norm, at least for Indians, as my colleagues from The Hindu who were posted there before I was, explained to me—they had been without valid visas and expired identity cards for several months at a time. The only kindness was that the overstay charges which were nominal were waived, though some correspondents were charged. While the authorities constantly suspected us of subversive activities, ensuring that we were followed everywhere, holding up our visas and identity cards was another form of harassment. Also, living without a visa, or with a single-entry visa, meant that you couldn’t rush back home in an emergency! Innumerable visits to the visa office and filling countless forms became an unhappy routine. It was a take-it or leave-it attitude—and we took it. When we were expelled, we were warned to be quiet about it by the authorities and some Pakistani journalists so that future correspondents were not affected by the bad publicity. People, even my own colleagues and my newspaper, were worried if a replacement for me would be permitted!
Living in a country, even if it was for nine months (too short a time to understand Pakistan, I am often told rather dismissively), is more valuable than short trips. Both countries revelled in babudom and paperwork. Among the many commonalities was the need to fill forms and everything about them had to be official, including seals. And the seals had to be round. I was perplexed when the telephone company and others asked for my organization’s seal to be stamped on each letter or application. I had to ask for bunches of letterheads from my head office in Chennai which obliged, but I hadn’t thought of bringing a seal. Finally I had to get one made with my office address and name on it, and I stamped away to glory on every letter or application I made. The obsession for letterheads and seals notwithstanding, I read to my amazement that the historic Simla Agreement signed between President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in July 1972 didn’t have the official seals of the respective governments, because it almost didn’t happen and everyone had nearly given up. As a result, there was no stationery or even a typewriter at hand; the Pakistani seal had been sent off with other luggage to Chandigarh.1
All my applications, stamped and sealed, requesting permission to travel out of Islamabad came to nothing. I wanted to visit Gah, the birthplace of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and do a story, as also Bangay, Bhagat Singh’s home. There was silence over an application to visit the ancient city of Taxila—you see, there is an ordnance depot nearby. In fact, the spooks (spies, or the guys who would follow me around at the behest of the Pakistani establishment) who got to know of my applications asked the official with whom I had lunch if he had given permission for my visit to Taxila, as if that was a crime. Rawalpindi was out of bounds anyway since it had the mighty Pakistan Army general headquarters, and I didn’t even apply! So a visit to the historic Murree Brewery, also in Rawalpindi, the garrison city as everyone called it, was out of the question, but I did manage to do a story on the wonderful brewery.
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I met a Pakistani journalist who was posted in India and he had warm memories of it and made it a point to tell me so at a party. Some Pakistani journalists I met had complaints, and one of them had his passport taken away and he never wanted to go back to India. The levels of harassment were often petty and unimaginable; there is no low both countries cannot stoop to. The Pakistani high commission officials in New Delhi were cut up about not being allowed to travel even to Agra to see the Taj Mahal or to visit the Aligarh Muslim University, which is unfortunate. But the Indian government does take Pakistani media delegations around the country for exposure, and one hilarious meeting they had was with Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (a very inspirational figure in Pakistan) who coughed into his muffler and didn’t seem to know much about Pakistan when the journalists questioned him.
Pakistan also obliges some with visas quite frequently. Many writers go for various literary festivals, and journalist Jatin Desai was a frequent visitor. I met delegations of journalists from India (there were two while I was there—one from the Mumbai Press Club and another from Kolkata), MPs, social workers and other people in the Pakistan–India friendship circuit, apart from writers like A.G. Noorani, Shobhaa De and Ritu Menon, and activists like Sushobha Barve. While Pakistan is fussy about visas, and restricts travel to some areas, India, too, displays similar tendencies and some areas like Kashmir are difficult to enter for human rights groups; more recently, NGOs who have taken on the government are at the receiving end of official petulance. This can be in the form of court cases, frozen bank accounts and scrapping of foreign-aid permissions. When it comes to suppression of rights and access to troubled areas, both India and Pakistan can function rather regressively.
In fact, while I was allowed to cover the Pakistan Parliament and go regularly to the foreign office, I learnt from Pakistani officials that their journalists were not always granted this leeway in India. A Pakistani official posted in New Delhi returned with unhappy memories of her stay and turned into a complete hawk thanks to the Indian media. It was difficult for her to even rent a place to stay. Yet this official was kind enough to plead for an Indian journalist whose visa was rejected and made sure she could come for a track-two meeting. She also intervened when an Indian journalist was attacked in Karachi while covering the 2014 elections.
India and Pakistan have not had the best relations, and yet Indian journalists have lived and reported with a fair degree of comfort and acceptance from Pakistan. The Hindu has a fine tradition of correspondents, all of whom are well-remembered much after they have left and who have been critical of the governments, and reported on various issues, even during the military regime of Musharraf. The Hindu correspondent Amit Baruah, even if he was not allowed to go to Kandahar to cover the hijack in 1999, when he was posted in Pakistan between 1997 and 2000, wrote about the events leading to the military coup by General Musharraf, and lived in Islamabad during the Kargil war, inside enemy country. Nirupama Subramanian who reported for The Hindu in Islamabad between 2006 and 2010, covered the lawyers’ agitation against Musharraf in 2007, interviewed the Baloch leader Akbar Bugti, and wrote on other major political events. She was given permission to go to Rawalpindi at the last minute to cover Benazir Bhutto’s historic rally where Bhutto was assassinated. This, despite the paranoia that Indians, especially women, are RAW agents sent to entice Pakistani men, which is laughable (I was the third woman correspondent posted there). My predecessor, Anita Joshua, was invited by the Pakistan Army to visit the site of the avalanche in Gayari sector which killed 140 people, the bulk of them soldiers, apart from civilians.
There was an inborn courtesy everywhere and a desire to change the status quo by some intrepid officials that ran on a different track from the suspicion about Indian journalists which was also very real. The ministry of interior made generous allowances for other journalists, and lovingly provided them with an armed escort to go to Waziristan (though The Hindu’s correspondents were permitted to enter Muzaffarabad—B. Muralidhar Reddy who reported from Chakothi in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir on the historic vis
it of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference delegation and later covered the launch of the Muzaffarabad–Srinagar bus service and its political implications, both in 2005, and Sandeep Dikshit in 2010 who was part of a team of eight Indian journalists accompanied only by a Pakistan Army captain in Bajaur tribal agency—an instance of rare openness at a time when the Pakistan Army was chasing the Tehreek-e-Taliban out of the region and sustaining huge number of casualties). As soon as I got there, a story on women fighter pilots in the Pakistan Air Force appeared in a British paper, and my editor wanted a follow-up. I did make a request to the Pakistan armed forces’ PR wing, Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), to which, unsurprisingly, there was no reply till I left. That story spoke of the women pilots who were likely to bomb Indian targets!
There was a democratically elected government in Pakistan, the second successive one in its military-rule dominated history, but the people and the government were up against a more decisive force, which sets the agenda ruthlessly when it comes to India. The spooks didn’t spare their own countrymen who interacted with Indian ‘spies’. During lunch with a government official, the dour duo tailing me sent the waiter to ask who he was. They sat across from us, glaring in disapproval. It was so laughable that they didn’t even recognize him and later when we left, they stopped his car and asked for his identification papers.
After 2011, there is no Pakistan correspondent in New Delhi, and there is talk of a bilateral agreement which stipulates that each country can have two journalists posted in the other. I checked on this agreement and didn’t come up with anything concrete—it seems to be more of an informal agreement to keep the good faith. From a three-city visa, when it came to Anita Joshua (2010 to 2013), her visa was restricted to Islamabad and it was single entry. She could not visit any other city in Pakistan except for two official trips to Quetta and Gayari. Mine was a visit visa for three months and again single entry. The buzz was the Pakistani establishment felt that since no journalist from that country was in New Delhi, why should visas be given to Indian journalists? Better sense prevailed after a lot of efforts by some journalists and Pakistani bureaucrats, but ‘the attack of nice’ obviously did not last long. A journalist who was visiting Islamabad from India hissed in my ear, ‘Do you know who didn’t want to give you a visa . . . it was the army which doesn’t want you here, don’t you see?’ I had other people telling me the army wants Indian journalists there. Everyone seemed to be an expert on who wanted and didn’t want Indian journalists, but their opinions mattered little. Despite all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, the ISPR included me in their media list and kept sending regular email and SMS updates. I was on the mailing list of most offices, including the PMO. The ISPR media-in-charge even sent a nice message to me, in response to mine, when I was leaving. Once he even called me up to guffaw at my pathetic Urdu, when I asked for a clarification.
Successive Indian journalists in Pakistan have for many years been taking a number of restrictions in their professional stride without complaint. I was already warned that I would be tailed and spooks would be stationed right outside my house. Phones, too, would be tapped. ‘You will be thought of as a RAW agent whatever you do,’ a colleague had warned.
The paranoia that prevails about the Indian or Pakistani state cannot go away if there is little media interaction and exchange. While the usual tenure for a journalist is three years, in my case I was asked to leave after nine months, with no reason given. In Islamabad, friends asked me what I had done to be expelled and I really didn’t have any answer because I didn’t know. I was grilled by a senior official after my op-ed interview with Mama Qadeer Baloch, who outdid Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi march by travelling on foot for over 3300 kilometres from Quetta to Islamabad to focus on the missing young people in Balochistan. The official’s take was that I should be writing on art and culture and not on political movements; did I write on Kashmir, for instance? he snarled.
Some government officials went out of their way to be helpful but they came up against a wall. A senior journalist and writer told me he wished he had the power to revoke the cancellation of my visa, but he could do nothing. The authorities seemed to have some problem with me and I heard that efforts were made to try and get them to retain the Press Trust of India’s correspondent, Snehesh Alex Philip, whose visa had also not been renewed. His wife had already gone to India for a wedding and couldn’t return, as her visa was not reissued. In the end, Snehesh and I were both asked to leave by 18 May 2014 without being given a reason. Since 2011, Pakistan has not posted a journalist in India. Earlier they had two nominees from Radio Pakistan and the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP). Javed Jadoon was posted in India for Radio Pakistan from 2008 and he left in 2011 while Sadiq Toor was the last APP correspondent who left a few years earlier. I had met both of them in Islamabad and they seemed to have nice things to say about their stay. Now neither India nor Pakistan has journalists from each other’s countries, and on their scorecard of pettiness, it’s quits. A balance has been achieved, however unbalanced that may be.
When I was expelled, in response to protests on Twitter, someone I think from Pakistan tweeted that granting a visa is a country’s sovereign right and I had to respect that. As if I had a choice. The visa is used as a deterrent by both countries. It is a reality that common people understand easily. On one of our many hikes in the Margalla Hills in Islamabad, Trail 6, my husband and I were almost at the top taking a break (not the time the spooks were after us), and we saw a young man heaving up, tired and breathless. He saw us and stopped to say ‘hello, how are you? in a fake American drawl. We replied with the traditional Urdu greeting. But you don’t look Pakistani, he said, astonished. We are Indians, we said—waiting for a reaction—and it was not entirely unexpected: he was ecstatic. He called out to his companions and they all greeted us like long-lost friends. All of them had given lots of money to agents for an Indian visa and it was a country they wanted very much to visit. They were from Gujranwala in the Punjab in Pakistan, and had come there for a Sufi saint’s fair at Golra Sharif in Islamabad. One of them asked if Pakistan was like India, and his friend was annoyed. He didn’t wait for my answer and said of course it’s similar. He explained that this visa denial is a ploy to keep us apart and never discover the truth about each other!
While on a personal level there is enthusiasm, as nations we remain daggers drawn. We can’t even get magazines or newspapers from each other’s countries. I met a retired brigadier who wanted so much to read India Today. The Pakistani TV channel Zindagi was hugely popular in India, as are all the Indian soaps in Pakistan. Actor Fawad Khan’s sweeping Indian conquest must outrank all wars and diplomacy, but his popularity didn’t save him when Karan Johar’s film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (in which Fawad had a role) was targeted for being ‘anti-national’. In the wake of the attack on Uri cantonment in Jammu and Kashmir on 16 September 2016, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) threatened to disrupt the film screening, and Johar finally broke his silence in October 2016,2 to give an undertaking that he would not use Pakistani stars in future films. So, on one level there is no pretence of even a moderate friendship. Cordiality can crumble at a touch, and all the noise and protest after we were expelled resulted in nothing. No one seemed to mind that journalists from each other’s countries couldn’t report without the tag of suspicion. Despite the many platitudes in support of an unfettered media from leaders in India and Pakistan, the basic issue was that there was no free media exchange or reporting. This shows a lack of openness and maturity, and the hollowness of the professed commitment to freedom of the press in both countries. Instead of strong protests, there were stories that we were spies and carrying out unfriendly activities.
There is little debate about this lack of media exchange, and it seems to have faded from public memory in any case. Even the exchange between the Karachi and Mumbai press clubs seems fraught with uncertainty.
With the stinginess over visas, there are only a few Indians in Islamabad other than the di
plomatic community, and they are in a severe minority. Often, you are the only Indian in a meeting—for instance, at the launch of a book on Indian nuclear deterrence, the author kept saying that China was not really a threat to India, insinuating that Pakistan was the target of India’s stockpiled weapons. It seemed to me very unhealthy that such events were so one-sided and lacked any deeper understanding or a broader picture. I attended a meeting of parliamentarians in Islamabad who were enthusiastic about friendship with India; everyone displayed detailed knowledge of India and her politics. A woman parliamentarian, who spoke favourably of Indians, suddenly asked, with evident anguish, why did Indians always stab you in the back? Another person who had just made a positive speech about relations with India agreed with the first woman and said, yes, the Indians were small-minded (unke chote dil aur dimag hai)— they needed to be a little more generous. I tried to keep my annoyance to myself, but later I rationalized and attributed such statements to stereotypes, a lack of adequate exchange between the two countries and opportunities to meet more often and clear the air. Pakistani officials told me that if you show Indians a beautiful painting, they will find a blemish in some corner! Such are the stereotypes that exist. Sometimes I felt it was the form to be nasty about Indians just as there were preconceived notions about Pakistanis, going by the many vicious Pakistani jokes that are quite popular in India.