Why Was An Indian Pulitzer Award Winning Journalist Stopped From Flying To the US?
A celebrated journalist and Pulitzer Award winner has been detained to leave from India, recent reports suggest. Sanna Irshad Mattoo said she was refrained from travelling to the US by authorities.
Mattoo was awarded the prestigious journalist award for her emotive and accurate photojournalistic work in the Covid-19 pandemic. She resides in the Indian-administered Kashmir. This has been brought to light when she did have a valid visa and ticket to travel. Neither has the Indian government nor the American authorities given her a reason for this, while she has also shared that this is the second incident in a span of four months that she has been denied entry to fly outside of India.
Many journalists have been denied to exit from India on separate occasions this year. In April, former Amnesty India chief Aakar Patel was stopped twice from boarding a flight to the US at Bangalore airport.
In March, journalist Rana Ayyub – who writes for the Washington Post – was stopped at Mumbai airport when she was about to board a flight to the UK to deliver a speech at the International Centre for Journalists.
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In August, Angad Singh, an Emmy-nominated American journalist of Indian-origin, was reportedly deported to New York soon after he landed in Delhi.
Earlier this year, the federal government deported Professor Filippo Osella, an anthropologist at the University of Sussex, who had been visiting India for more than 30 years.
It seems most have had something or the other done which has not gone well with the Indian government, at some point of time. Earlier on, it was a federal investigation against Mr. Aakar Patel about Amnesty allegedly breaking India’s foreign currency exchange laws during Mr. Patel’s tenure as its chief. The agency called him a “flight risk.” He was later asked by a court not to leave the country without its permission.
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For the renowned professor Osella, last week, the Indian government defended its decision in court, saying that the academician had been placed in the “highest category of blacklisting” based on “sufficient material” against him.
