Let the People Meet

“I tried to submit the visa application for India for 3 days. One day I also reached there at 5 in the morning. No luck. They open the window for less than 2 hours and take the application of at the most 12 females (each with 3 to 5 passports).They do not even give any number for the next day to those who waited there for 7-8 hours, so the next day it is the same story all over again. Women coming from different villages and towns reach there at 2 in the morning and they are always ahead of me. Today I gave up. I cannot spend the night there. TCS has opened a desk for processing Indian visas. I had gone there also. They said that it will take three months. They do not charge much from residents of Pindi-Islamabad. But three months! Kaun jeeta hai teri zulf ke sar hone tak. So it is a short and sour story of the wish and intention to go to India, with a remote hope that it may make Ather a bit cheerful.” Thus wrote a 60-year old Islamabad-based teacher to a relative, about her attempts to get an Indian visa, in order to be with a nephew who had undergone multiple spinal surgeries.

The story of Indians attempting to seek visas from the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi is no different – except that there is not even ‘drop box’ facility of the kind that the Indian High Commission initiated in Pakistan a couple of months ago. Besides the High Commission, the office of the respected politician Nirmala Deshpande in New Delhi is crowded with people from around the country, camping out there hoping for some help from this veteran peace activist who has been at the forefront of the people-to-people initiative between India and Pakistan, along with Dr Mubashir Hasan in this country. Some visa-seekers are from remote villages so far removed from the corridors of power that they don’t even know they need a document called the passport in order to travel abroad, found the France-based activist Harsh Kapoor, who was recently in Delhi and witnessed this scene.

In Pakistan, the demand for Indian visas is as much as 1500 – per day - from around the country, according to Kamal Parvez, Press Attache at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. However, the consulate can only issue 300-400 visas a day, since neither country has brought diplomatic and visa staff to full-strength yet.

Besides staff shortage, the Indian mission in Islamabad and the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi are overburdened by being the sole visa-issuing authority in each other’s countries, since their respective consulates in Karachi and Bombay were shut down over a decade ago. The ground-breaking SAARC summit in Islamabad in January 2004 led to talk of reviving these consulates in order to ease the pressure on the capital city consulates, and facilitate residents in the southern part of each country. However, India has yet to receive an answer from the Pakistan Foreign Office to their request, made in Feb 2004, to open a camp office in Karachi.

Pakistan High Commission spokesman Rai Riaz Hussain Hussain in New Delhi is cautious in his response to repeated requests for more information. After duly consulting the “diplomatic wing”, he makes no mention of the number of visas being issued currently or what the demand is, and bypasses the question of whether Islamabad plans to use a courier service to facilitate Indian visa seekers. All he will say is that “The opening of visa offices at
Bombay and Karachi will be done simultaneously. We are trying to locate some place in Bombay as India has not given Jinnah house to us. In this connection our officers have visited Bombay also. Since the strength of this mission has not been restored till now therefore we cannot cope with the visa requirements here. However we do maximum effort to facilitate visa seekers.”

Despite these constraints, the past few years have seen an increase in echanges involving students, journalists, businessmen and women, doctors, dentists, activists, artists and filmmakers, and academics, to name a few sectors that have become more engaged with their counterparts across borders. The organizers of annual events like the Pakistan-India Peoples
Forum conventions, the South Asia Free Media Association, the Kara Film Festival in Karachi and the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop’s Dance and Drama Festival in Lahore manage to obtain visas for most of their participants -- but not everyone is as high-profile, well-connected or determined and ordinary people like the Islamabad teacher or the Indian villager still have it rough. Even celebrities are kept on tenterhooks till the last minute before visas are granted – sometimes too late to enable them to attend the conference being held.

“My secretary had to sit in Delhi for four days,” says noted Bombay-based actor Om Puri, in Karachi for the Kara Fest. He is among the growing numbers calling for an abolition of the visa system between our two countries. “All a British citizen needs in order to visit the USA is proof of his or her citizenship. This should be the case with us Indians and Pakistanis too,” he suggests. As it was before we became entrenched in our positions as the best of enemies.