India's visa on arrival a giant leap: Will journalists, Pakistan-born find it easier to visit now?

A visa on arrival at Indian airports. That is undoubtedly a giant leap forward for India. Foreign nationals of 43 countries (see the list here) can now avoid the queues, headaches and general bullheaded bureaucracy at Indian consulates and their outsourcing centres and apply for visas online, pay $60 and bring a printout to any of nine international airports in India and walk into the country. Of course you might land at the airport to find one babu slowly and laboriously processing a long line of flight-weary visitors all waving their printouts but it’s still better than taking days off work to haunt the corridors of Indian consulates. This is an enormous relief given that getting a visa to India had in the name of getting more streamlined only gotten more byzantine. The company India had outsourced its visa processing to had instead of easing the pain only added to the headaches. The latest one was Cox and Kings and the experiences of customers read like an escalating Comedy of Errors except for the person trying to come to India there was nothing remotely funny about lost passports, applications rejected for baffling reasons and visas that arrived after the flight departed. On top of that 70 passports got stolen from the office of BLS, Cox and Kings’ predecessor. “When the CKGS started their services, there was a crisis situation due to software issues, call center problems and their inability to handle huge volumes of work,” Deputy Consul General Dr. K J Srinivasa admitted to India Real Time in an email. [caption id=“attachment_1741619” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Centre is hoping to have the entire procedure in place by June 2015.[/caption] Now you can just do it at home, pay your fee and show up at the airport for your visa and biometrics. So perhaps now that we are making a bold stride into a more modern user-friendly world we can revisit some of our other cast-in-stone archaic rules. For example, our paranoia about anyone journalist-ish visiting India. India (and to be fair many other countries ) are nervous about media even while tom-tomming their freedom of press credentials. The Bangladesh visa-on-arrival said bluntly the visa on arrival did not extend to journalists. Of course, they say that after arrival. India has its own bee in its bonnet about journalists as well. As Stephan Richter trying to come to a World Bank sponsored conference in Delhi found out despite having an official letter of invitation. That visa did not arrive on time. On another occasion when he was planning to merely comes as a tourist to visit a friend, the consulate refused to give him a tourist visa because one of his occupations involved running a global media website. And when he discovered getting a journalist visa took weeks and he wanted to cancel the application and get his passport back he was warned it would be considered as a “visa denial” and a black mark in his record for all future visas. Richter tells the story of his travails on Globalist.com.

Even though planning a tourist trip, since I still just wanted to see India for the first time, I was nevertheless told that I would have to apply as a journalist. Once deemed a journalist by Indian authorities, forever a journalist. Curiously enough, the authorities also wanted me to sign a form that I would “not engage in any journalistic activities” – even though they required me to apply for a “J” visa.

The absurdity of applying for a J-visa and then signing an undertaking not to do any journalistic activity escapes the babus of our consulates and high commissions. Meanwhile I remember an American journalist friend trying to come to India to do a story about how India had become a go-to destination for Americans struggling with healthcare costs in America. It was potentially a boost to medical tourism, hardly a damning expose. But her journalist visa would not come through even as the patients she was trying to accompany flew off to India for their surgeries. Eventually she applied again changing the name of her employer on the form from the newspaper’s name to the parent company of that newspaper. Luckily that was a big conglomerate that had many businesses and was not associated with media. She got a tourist visa in a flash. That just underscores both the futility and the ridiculousness of these blanket bans. India is a flourishing democracy. It should be able to take a few blows on its chin from some mean-spirited articles now and then and actually wear them as a badge of honour to prove it’s openness. And it gets plenty of harsh critiques from Indian journalists in India already. To be afraid of the “foreign hand” is so Indira Gandhi anyway. No wonder as Richter writes the world’s largest democracy (and one with decent English comprehension) enjoys only a miniscule share of international tourist visits – 0.6%. China, hardly a bastion of openness, has 5.1% market share. That’s why this online visa is a huge step forward in treating tourists and visitors as guests who are welcome rather than annoying bothersome impositions on our hospitality. Of course, even the 43 country passports holders would be advised to read the fine print. As the online visa site points out if you are of Pakistani origin you should apply for “regular Visa” at Indian missions. That basically means forget it as many writers and students have discovered. Not long ago an Oxford-Cambridge debating team visiting India found one of its captains stranded in London because his parents had been born in Pakistan. The birth “sins” of our grandfathers can be visited on our grandchildren as far as visa officials are concerned. Hopefully this visa on arrival is just a harbinger of other changes to come. That would truly put the incredible into Incredible India!