Why India Deported U.S. Researcher Working on Amnesty Report

By KRISHNA POKHAREL

Christine Mehtaan American researcher who said recently she was deported from India for investigating alleged human rights violations for Amnesty International, broke the conditions of her visa and contributed to a one-sided report, an Indian government spokesman said.The spokesman, who asked not to be named, said on Monday that Ms. Mehta, who was in India on a permit that allowed her to live and work in the country for 15 years, acted against visa conditions that stipulate research requires special permission.The spokesman added that “the government welcomes any criticism provided it’s based on facts” but any report made in a “clandestine manner” and projecting only negative aspects of the government is “highly objectionable.”Ms. Mehta told India Real Time on Friday in a telephone interview from Washington D.C. that she believed she was deported because of the report she was working on about human rights in Kashmir.She was part of the rights group’s “team on the recently released Kashmir report, and was involved in conceptualizing the research, carrying out the field work, drafting the report, conducting advocacy visits and working on related outputs, ” Amnesty International India said in an emailed response to questions Thursday.Ms. Mehta has left Amnesty International since her deportation and isn’t currently affiliated with any organization.The other authors of the report, titled “Denied: Failures in accountability for human rights violations by security force personnel in Jammu and Kashmir,” were Indian. The research concluded that in the 25 years since a law came into force that protects security forces from prosecution, no member of the security forces has been tried for alleged human rights violations in a civilian court. The law, known as the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, is designed to tame armed militancy in the region.Ms. Mehta, 25, first wrote about her deportation in an Indian daily The Hindu on Thursday, a day after the Amnesty report was released in India. She wrote that in 2014 she was “on the cusp of publishing a report on the abuses committed under the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Jammu and Kashmir.”“Despite the need for reform amongst the ranks, the Indian government remains extremely sensitive to the image of its army and other security forces,” she wrote. “The state terms anyone who raises questions about the conduct of the security forces as ‘anti-national.’”Before taking up the research on Kashmir, Ms. Mehta says she and her employer discussed the consequences of her work after discovering a restrictive clause relating to her status as a PIO, or person of Indian origin, that prohibited her from conducting research activities without consent from the government. She and her employer took the chance, confident that the-then “government wouldn’t use the little-known and apparently rarely used provision” against her, Ms. Mehta wrote.Amnesty International India said in a separate emailed response on Tuesday: “At the time, there was no existing precedent to our knowledge of anyone with PIO/OCI status being deported or having their status revoked for undertaking research. At no point did either Amnesty International India or Christine herself misrepresent her PIO/OCI status.”“In the latter half of 2014, when there were indications that the government was examining these restrictions more closely, we immediately started a conversation with Christine about her taking on a different role within the organization,” Amnesty International India said in the response. It said that it “maintains that the government order asking Christine Mehta to leave the country was unwarranted.”Ms. Mehta said in the interview that her friends in India and family in the U.S. were very “shocked and surprised” at her deportation. She writes in The Hindu that she didn’t challenge her deportation in any court or speak publicly about it until now, hoping this might earn her another chance to publish or continue her work. After Amnesty International published the report that Ms. Mehta spent nearly two years working on, it “was time for me to speak out,” she wrote.As an activist, Ms. Mehta lays out her idea of India: A “country of thriving debate, intellect, and diversity; a country that should be able to confront its darkest aspects and rectify its mistakes.”