Amruta Slee was born in India in 1961. She moved to Australia with her stepfather in 1970 and had lived in Australia since then. But India lived inside her all the time. Mumbai is still Bombay for her, where she spent her initial years. And she is proud of being born in India. She says, “I love India. I have friends and family there. I go there often.”
And she wanted to go there again. This time as a journalist to understand how India has changed over the years. But she has not been granted the visa. “We applied, and we were told that the visas were pre-approved by the desk of VFS global and that we should hear in a few days. And then we did not hear anything,” says Ms Slee.
Ms Slee works for Late Night Live on Radio National. She wants to go to India and talk about the changes which had happened in the country in the 20 years since her program last went to India.
She explains, “My idea was that the country had undergone enormous changes and the western media has largely not kept up with those changes. So there was everything from politics to society. I got a grant from the Australia-India Council which is part of DFAT. And I had set up 16 or 17 interviews in India. These are experts in their fields and ordinary people, up and coming student leaders and people who have been political and economic journalists for a long time. So, it was really a broad range of people to give people a good idea of contemporary India.”
Ms Slee and her three colleagues applied for their journalist visas. She says, “We applied in November, but we were told to come back in January because the clock starts ticking once you get the visa. We went back a little earlier because we were nervous about the little time that was leaving between applying and when we were due to fly out on the February 1st.”
But the four journalists never got their visas. “I kept calling and emailing and calling and contacting people and getting told that visas always took some time and that we should wait. I called DFAT, who had given us the grant, to ask if they knew what the hold-up was. I called friends who were old India hands, people who worked at embassies, journalists who might have a contact. I sent countless emails, I called Julie Bishop's office, and I called Delhi.”
Ms Slee got nothing but assurances. And then a source told her it could be about a story ABC had done last year. “When I was in such a panic three days before we were due to leave, I spoke to a very highly placed source in the Australian government who told me that they had been told in complete confidentially that there was a problem with a former story the ABC had done about the Adani mines.”
In October last year, an ABC reporter Stephen Long had done an investigative story about the Adani coal mine.
The visa denial has left Amruta Slee heart-broken. “I have always believed that India has press freedom the way it has constitutional freedoms which were set up by the leaders of independence. Friends in India would have been telling me over the years that are no longer true. But one thing to be told fine but it’s another thing to experience something. And once you experienced it, it is hard to pretend the freedoms aren’t being threatened anymore.”
“It’s terrible to realize this is about your country. I think that most of us who come from another country and live here in Australia take some pride in the country we were born in, for better or worse... it was extremely confronting to me to realize that it is also a country which is capable of this,” adds Ms Slee.
S Venkat Narayan, President of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia, does not agree that freedom of the press is under any kind of danger in India. Though, he finds this incident unfortunate but does not believe that Government of India is "kicking out guys they don’t like." He says, "The very outset, I want to say that being the world’s largest democracy with more than one hundred thousand newspapers and other publications and nearly a thousand TV channels, India has this tradition of freedom of the press. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world come to cover India on special assignments or are being posted here. So, unless the government of India has a valid reason to deny a visa to somebody who wants to come and work here, this is simply not justifiable. If any instance of visa denial is brought to the government’s notice and the government should be asked to give a valid explanation of denying a visa to a visiting journalist.”
Mr Narayan says that Slee should have been given a valid explanation. "In this particular case, the applicant has not been given any reason is very unfortunate but I would not like to say that there is a continuing trend of Government of India denying visas to journalists. At least 250 of the foreign journalists are the members of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Half of them are foreign nationals who are posted in India. They are based here with their offices and families and they travel the whole of South Asia and come back here. So, these guys come here on work visas and are doing their jobs. So, if anybody says there is a trend of Government of India kicking out guys they don’t like or anything like that, I am not willing to accept that," says Narayan.
We have written to Indian High Commission in Canberra requesting to share their perspective on Amruta’s claims, but no response has been received yet. We will update the story as soon the High Commission’s response arrives.
However the Consulate General of India, Sydney tweeted this evening, "Delay in issuing visas to ABC news team has nothing to do with the issues mentioned in this article. ABC news journalists violated Indian visa rules recently by engaging in activities which were not declared at the time of applying their visas."
