“Cancel without prejudice.” The large red stamp on Sanna Irshad Mattoo’s travel document brought the photojournalist’s plans to an abrupt end.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was due to travel to Paris earlier this month for a book launch and the Arles Rencontres photography festival in France.
She had a travel visa and air ticket, but when Mattu tried to board the plane in Delhi, immigration officials briefly detained the journalist and told her she was banned from travelling abroad.
No one explained the reason for the ban, Matu said.
“It’s disappointing and disturbing not to be able to attend the Arles Photo Festival,” Matou told VOA.
This festival has a special meaning for Matu. She is one of 10 recipients of the 2020 Serendipity Arles grant.
Her work has also won international acclaim, and she was part of a Reuters team that won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the pandemic in India.
Legal and media analysts say travel bans like those imposed on Matu violate constitutional rights to travel and come amid a broader trend of harassment against critics.
At least four journalists from Indian-administered Kashmir have been banned from travelling abroad since Delhi revoked the region’s special autonomous status in August 2019. Journalists and rights activists elsewhere in India, including investigative journalist Rana Ayub and Amnesty International chairman Akar Patel, have also been blocked or delayed travel in India.
In Ayyub’s case, immigration officials at Mumbai airport prevented the investigative journalist, known for covering religious violence and extrajudicial killings, from boarding a flight to Britain on March 29, saying she was being investigated for money laundering.
Ayub told CPJ at the time that she received the subpoena an hour before her scheduled departure time. She was later able to travel.
While officials don’t usually provide a reason for the ban, a Kashmiri journalist said officials cited unrest in Indian-controlled areas when he was blocked.
Gowhar Geelani, a freelancer for German media outlet Deutsche Welle, was detained at an airport in New Delhi in 2019 on his way to Bonn for media training.
Geelani said in an account at the time that immigration officials told him there was “a lot of unrest in Kashmir” and they were just following orders.
People who have been banned from travel can use an appeals process.
Neither the Indian Immigration Service nor its embassy in Washington responded to VOA’s request for comment.
“Systemic Harassment”
In a statement on Matu’s case, the International Federation of Journalists described the travel ban as “systematic harassment and a serious imposition of press freedom”.
For Matu, the ban was a frustrating inconvenience.
“Immigration officers at Delhi airport kept me waiting for more than two hours,” Mattu said. Then “the officer told me I couldn’t get on the plane.”
But when asked by reporters why she was delayed, she said “officials said they were not sure why.”
Umair N. Ronga, a lawyer at the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in Srinagar, told VOA that travel is a fundamental right in India.
“Restricting a person from traveling abroad and preventing a person from performing their professional duties amounts to a violation of a fundamental right,” Longa said, adding that such a ban could be challenged under Article 226 of the constitution.
Meenaksh Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, believes that Indian authorities have used the travel ban to cover up their poor human rights record.
A better approach, she said, would be for the government to focus on ending lawlessness, including against minorities and Muslims, to preserve its reputation abroad.
International bodies including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have called on the Indian government to take action to end retaliatory attacks on Ayyub and others investigating human rights abuses.
Human Rights Watch said in 2021 that authorities used “surveillance, politically motivated prosecutions, harassment, online trolling and tax raids” to target critics.
In an apparent response to claims that India is going backwards on rights, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the country the “mother of democracy” at last month’s G7 summit in Germany.
“Government policy is systematically preventing independent reporting of events in Kashmir,” Manoj Joshi, a researcher at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, told VOA. “Journalists have been arrested, charged with sedition and prevented from doing their work.”
India fell in the World Press Freedom Index. According to Reporters Without Borders, it is currently ranked 150 out of 180 countries, 1 of which has the best media atmosphere.
The media watchdog said its findings showed “press freedom is in crisis” across India and described the situation of journalists in Kashmir as particularly “worrying”.
For now, Matu is back in Srinagar to wait to see if the ban will be lifted.
“I hope the authorities will investigate this matter as soon as possible so that I can travel freely,” she said.
