Two days after Government of India withdrew his OCI status, author and journalist Aatish Taseer has responded with a question of his own on the website of the American magazine TIME. The Indian Consulate in New York, he writes, has informed him that he had been put on a blacklist and will not get even a Tourist Visa to visit India, where his mother Journalist Tavleen Singh lives.

Taseer has good reasons to feel upset. It has always been known in New Delhi, if not elsewhere in India, that he was born out of wedlock, that he was born in London and he was a British citizen. After his father, Salman Taseer, a prominent Pakistani politician, was assassinated in 2011, his links with his father’s family in Pakistan had also been known. Neither he nor his mother hid it.

Why then has the Union Home Ministry woken up in 2019 and accused him of hiding the fact that his father was a Pakistani ? Taseer rightly feels it may have a lot to do with a commentary he wrote for TIME in May this year, an unflattering account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government, which appeared under the headline, “The Divider-in-Chief”.