Francesca Orsini, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Hindi language, was apparently turned back from Delhi airport despite having a valid visa because of past violation of visa conditions.
Orsini, a scholar of Hindi and professor emerita at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was deported on Monday soon after she arrived from Hong Kong, despite holding a valid five-year e-visa.
PTI quoted unnamed sources in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs as saying that Orsini has been on a 'black list' since March 2025 for violation of visa conditions.
"Francesca Orsini was on a tourist visa, but she has been violating visa conditions," the news agency quoted the source as saying.
"This is a standard global practice that if a person is found violating visa conditions, he/she can be black listed," the source said.
Countries do take action if visa conditions are violated. “When I travelled to the US for the first time in 2006, I was asked at JFK airport in New York why I was there on a B1/B2 [tourist] visa,” said an Indian journalist. “When I explained that I was there for meetings with my colleagues at our office in New York, I was allowed in. I faced the same question every time I travelled for work, and was always reminded that I could not report from the US with a B1/B2 visa.”
The news about Orsini’s deportation was first broken by The Wire, and the news website’s editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, also cited unnamed government sources justifying Orsini’s deportation and slammed the purported reason.
In a post on X late on Tuesday, Varadarajan said officials were suggesting on strict condition of anonymity that Orsini had been blacklisted for doing “research” during a past visit on a tourist visa.
"Think about this for a second. Orsini is a professor of Hindi, her most celebrated work is on the Hindi public sphere. So what these officials are suggesting is that if she comes to India on a tourist visa, she cannot speak to people in Hindi, cannot meet friends who are Hindi scholars, cannot watch a Hindi play or attend a mushaira or Kavi sammelan as all this would be considered “research”!" Varadarajan wrote.
He added that India’s bureaucracy was “anti-intellectual at the best of times,” and accused those in power of having “crossed all limits of rationality and basic common sense”.
The government has not commented officially on the matter. That is not unusual. No country usually offers explanations on individual entry refusals; India is no exception.
