Did the Indian government cancel my honeymoon because I’m a journalist?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Any time journalists panic when former President Donald Trump fulminates about the failures of the press, it’s important to remember what an actual government oppression of journalists looks like. While anyone can enter the United States, legally or illegally, and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, other countries blacklist journalists simply for doing their jobs.
In particular, the Indian government will deny foreign journalists entry to the country, as I unfortunately learned fewer than 24 hours before leaving for my honeymoon. Perhaps this is a morality tale cautioning against my own naivete, but it’s also evidence of how wildly popular Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has indeed cracked down on press freedom.
EVIDENCE OF BIDEN WRONGDOING CONSIDERABLE
The Indian government allows the application of foreign and business visas up to as few as four days in advance of arrival as long as the applicant is doing so online, and a traveler cannot apply for a standard 30-day visa earlier than 30 days in advance of reaching India. Hence, when my husband applied for our visas two weeks before our honeymoon in New Delhi, neither of us thought we’d have any complications.
His application was approved immediately, but they asked me what the purpose of our trip was. Despite assuring the Indian government that we were traveling solely as tourists — part of why two workaholics choose to vacation 9 1/2 time zones away from home is to escape the possibility of remote work — the Indian government didn’t respond…ever.
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Despite our repeated calls and emails every day for six days, it wasn’t until my husband drove to the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., that we were informed my tourist visa would be denied because my occupation is journalism, even though I was not traveling for journalism. We tried a second professional visa application but were not so kindly informed that it would likely never be approved. (Just imagine the train wreck that would have resulted for would-be tourists not already living a stone’s throw away from the nation’s capital and the world’s embassies.)
And with a day before our departure on a honeymoon we’ve waited nearly five months for after our wedding, we scrapped our entire trip and designed a new one to Argentina from scratch. Hasta la vista, India!