Nairobi tragedy, then Indian red tape: Ordeal of victim's kin

Early this morning, Chennai resident Sanjivi Natarajan left for Nairobi on one of the most painful missions anyone can have: to collect the body of his brother, Sridhar, killed in the terrorist attack on the Westgate mall. He is scheduled to be received at Nairobi airport by Indian embassy staff, who are already caring for Sridhar Natarajan’s wife, Manjula, who is in critical care at a city hospital. In the forty-eight hours before Sanjivi Natarajan’s departure, though, he faced extraordinary trauma - the consequence not just of the agonising news the family had received from Nairobi, but a bizarre bureaucratic barbed-wire fence that could only have been built in India. [caption id=“attachment_1130133” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A member of Kenya’s security forces mans a checkpoint outside the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. AP image[/caption] “We started planning on getting Sanjivi to Nairobi Sunday night,” says a family member, who did not want to be named, to Firstpost. According to the family, the Ministry of External Affairs did not contact them, so they made their own arrangements. Sanjivi initially tried to leave at 4.30am on Monday morning on a Qatar flight. But at the airport, he was stopped because he had not taken a vaccination for yellow fever. “We began contacting officials, and we were told that he should arrive at the Port Office for vaccinations at any time Monday morning,” says the relative. “But when he reached there, the office was shut. It turned out that the officials had forgotten to tell them to keep the clinic open for him,” the relative said. Sanjivi was told that he could only be vaccinated on Wednesday, which would be much too late. “When he came back home, he got a call at 3.30pm, saying he should come back to the office for his vaccination, but now with a spare passport holder-since the rules mandate that two people must be travelling for a vial of yellow fever vaccine to be opened,” said the family member. “Firstly, this back-and-forth at such a time of crisis in inconvenient to say the least. He had family matters to take care of. There were logistical reasons that he could not go for this,” he said. The confrontation erupted into “heated words,” recounts the family member. “The Ministry of External Affairs has insisted to the media and everyone else they speak to that they are doing everything for us, but this is not true,” said the relative.“They told us that we were being ‘high-maintenance’, even though they were doing everything to help us." Sridhar and his wife had moved to Nigeria five years ago and later shifted to Kenya after he got a job with a pharma firm in Nairobi. The other Indian who died in the attack was identified as Paramshu Jain, the 8-year-old son of a banker in Nairobi. Finally after much hue and cry the Director arranged for a spare passport holder to show up pro-forma, and Sanjivi is now hoping to leave at 4.30am on Tuesday morning. “We are hoping there are no more goof-ups at the Nairobi airport,” says the relative. Manjula has already undergone one surgery, and is currently critical but stable. She is scheduled for several more macrofacial surgeries over the coming week. “There has been very little information flowing from the Ministry of External Affairs,” says the relative. “We have had to do everything for ourselves. Their reaction has been shoddy, to say the least.” Ministry of External Affairs officials told Firstpost that they felt deeply for the family, and had done all they could to help. However, one official said, a maze of rules created by what he called “a nanny state” meant the MEA itself had to work overtime to clear the bureaucratic maze.  “Look,” he said, “we should not have a shortage of yellow fever vaccine, but we did, and there’s not a lot the MEA can do about it.  The Chennai health officials cited norms forbidding them from using a vial from the limited stock of vaccine for just one person, and we didn’t have the authority to overrule them.  And perhaps the doctors should have waited longer for Sanjivi, but that’s again not something the MEA can do anything about.” Finally, the official said, the MEA contacted the Indian Embassy in Nairobi, who said they would arrange for vaccination on Sanjivi’s arrival - and requested immigration authorities to exempt him from the vaccination requirement, something that technically was outside their power. Later, though, immigration authorities raised the prospect that Sanjivi might have been stopped in transit at Doha - leading the MEA to make a second, and finally successful, attempt to get the vaccination done by Chennai’s health authorities. The thing is, the rules themselves make no sense.  First, yellow fever vaccine takes a minimum of ten days to kick in. This means Sanjivi will be unprotected from the disease while he is Kenya, shot or no shot.  Secondly, the vaccination is meant to protect India from the disease spreading here, not Kenya, where it already exists.  Thus, the vaccination certificate is actually needed on return from a yellow-fever zone, not when going to one.  Yet, Indian immigration rules mandate that it be checked for outbound travellers as well - and don’t provide for emergency exemptions.  Ironically, the certificate is not checked for many passengers from yellow fever zones returning to India, since they transit through third countries where the disease isn’t endemic. Fascinatingly, World Health Organization guidelines say vaccination is not recommended for travellers to Nairobi, since the disease is not endemic there. Put simply, Sanjivi was put through huge harassment for no discernible health benefit, simply because of a bureaucratic rule no-one had the power to overturn. Needless to say, the rules would likely have been waived if he’d been a well-networked VIP. And that says something very depressing about our country.