New Delhi, Dec. 2: A young Indian Foreign Service officer, Mohammad Shahid Alam, could not travel with his batchmates to New York to attend a United Nations programme last month because of his name.
Alam, 28, was to be part of a group of IFS officers of the 2010 batch that attended a 10-day orientation course at the UN headquarters in mid-November.
The group of 12 had applied for US visas five days before their travel date because that is the time it takes for diplomatic passport holders.
While the US embassy in New Delhi readily issued visas to the rest, Alam — the only Muslim in the group and number three on the 2010 batch IFS merit list —was asked to wait because his name had triggered an alarm in the database on “suspects” from across the world that Washington maintains.
“The team had applied for their visas only five days before their date of journey and in between was a weekend. The team would have missed their course by the time Alam’s clearance may have come along,” a source said.
So Alam did not pursue the visa and the embassy treated the request as dropped.
Many officers are aghast that Alam’s batchmates went ahead with their tour instead of requesting the external affairs ministry to try and reschedule the course at a later date, to give time for the clearance to come through.
Government sources said the reason for delay in such cases is when a visa applicant’s name matches that of a terror suspect in the US database that contains over five lakh names.
This was not the first instance of the US holding back or refusing a visa to a Muslim civil servant from India, the sources said.
A highly placed source said there have been as many as five instances in recent months where the US has denied visas to Class I government officers with Muslim names from India. “We have taken up the issue with the Americans in the past. We will take up the issue of these five officers as well,” the source said.
Government officials said the problem was with the stricter security checks that Washington has put in place since the incident on Christmas Day in 2009 when a 23-year-old Nigerian —– Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — sneaked past their security apparatus to detonate an explosive on a Northwest Airlines flight. A malfunction of the device saved the 278 passengers and crew.
The US authorities check visa applicants’ names against the database in Washington. “There are several instances of mistaken identities where a person may be denied a visa only because his name matches that of a ‘suspect’ in their list,” the government source said.
Government officials said that India had a similar database on suspects and there have been “hundreds upon hundreds” of cases where people, particularly from Pakistan, cannot visit because their name might be identical to that of a suspect on the list.
A home ministry source said at times they have been forced to refuse visas to even 80-year-olds from Pakistan who had migrated from India and wanted to meet their relatives here before they died only because their name matched that of a terror suspect. Many of these names in the database do not have any other detail, such as age or photograph.
