‘National security’ nets another prey

Till a few months ago, Sanjay Nesri’s career graph could inspire awe. The Mumbai-born 57-year-old rose up the ranks from being a driver of an American diplomat to become a security investigator with the American Consulate in Mumbai.

While Nesri’s (name changed) hard work won him a special immigration status to the US, the Indian government in February 2007 barred him from India by cancelling his life-long visa and Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) registration card without giving a reason.

Five months later and after losing his case in the Bombay High Court (HC), Nesri is none the wiser. The government justified its move stating that an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report found Nesri to be a threat to national security. But Nesri, who has no criminal record, does not know what he has done to threaten India’s security.

Nesri could be yet another casualty to the carefully-crafted ambiguity of the term —national security. It’s scope is large enough to net Bandra-boy Arun Ferreira on the basis of ‘evidence’ recovered from his pen drive regarding his alleged Naxalite links or to label Delhi-based Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Geelani a ‘terrorist’ for possessing a widely-circulated report on the deployment of Indian troops in Kashmir.  

Geelani spent seven months in prison and was acquitted in 2003. For Navi Mumbai resident BK Subbarao, it took five years to get rid of the ‘spy’ tag slapped on him in 1988 after he was intercepted at the airport for carrying his own PhD thesis.

Recently, a US citizen working for a Mumbai newspaper was denied a visa extension on the grounds that she had written an adverse report on an untoward incident in Nagpur. Pulling the right strings in New Delhi helped set the record right. “The government is used to passing orders in the guise of national security. The courts must scrutinise such orders,” said senior lawyer Aspi Chinoy.

In Nesri’s case, Chief Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice SC Dharmadhikari did call for the confidential intelligence records. Their order quotes a 1999 letter written by the US Consul General recommending Nesri for US citizenship and praising his “highest degree of devotion to American interests” and his efforts to find out potential threats to the US mission personnel during the Mumbai riots. The letter, the judges noted “partially supports” the adverse IB reports.

The IB reports were not shown to Nesri or his lawyer and therefore remain uncontested. Interestingly, while the judges declined to examine the veracity of the reports in Nesri’s case, in the past, HC judges have done so.

In January 2007, the HC overruled the government’s move to deny a long-term visa to Tora Khasgir’s Australian husband Reza Borhani on a mere technical violation. Khasgir had moved court as the authorities had refused to give the reason for denying her husband a visa, which he was entitled to by virtue of marrying an Indian.

“Transparency cannot be compromised on any pretext in this age of globalisation,” said lawyer Jamshed Mistry. Nesri, who has to leave India by July 20, does not know if he’ll ever be able to return to the city he grew up in.