immigration officer

Bengaluru resident

... and other questions anin Delhi posed to a cityBeing questioned by an immigration officer at the airport is standard procedure and there is a variety of questions that the officers come up with. But Reema (name changed), a, will never forget the type of questions she was asked, which left her shaken.On the night of March 18 at 9.30 pm, Reema landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. She was travelling alone from Bengaluru to Hong Kong via Delhi. Reema had to shift from a domestic to an international flight which was scheduled at 2 am. However, on reaching the immigration desk, Reema had the shock of her life. She alleges that an immigration officer sexually harassed her verbally there.Reema, who is a homemaker, said, “He started asking me some irrelevant and rather dirty questions.He asked me questions like how many children I had and where I had left them. ‘You young girls have children and then don’t care and leave them with parents and do majja with men. Do you drink, do you smoke, do you eat chicken, do you have fun with men when your husband is not there? Have you done surgery for birth control?’ were the questions asked. The last question was asked four times.”Even as she stared dumb in shock, the questions got nastier. “I was asked, ‘Do you sleep with other men when your husband is at work? Would you like to have the third child with me because my wife doesn’t want to have a third child? Why are you going alone to Hong Kong, to have fun with your husband, or anyone else? Will you have fun with me? Are you staying with anyone else in Hong Kong?”She says the officer concluded with, “Give me your personal number, which I could call you when your husband isn’t at home.” Not knowing what to do, Reema pulled out her phone and called one of her friends and started talking loudly about the officer. Reema, said, “I was travelling alone and did not know what to do. I was in a state of shock, so I could not immediately go and complain about the officer.”However, on her return from Hong Kong on March 23 at 12:30 am along with her husband Hemant (name changed), they decided to file a complaint. The couple first went to the airport police section. Reema said, “My husband and I waited there for 15 minutes, but there was not a single policeman to complain.” They then approached the Assistant Foreigners Regional Registration Officer (AFRRO) Alok Kumar Verma, to file a complaint. But to their surprise the AFRRO said he could not take down any written complaint and handed over a pamphlet of the department of immigration which had an email ID where they could complain.Just when Reema and her husband were about to leave the AFRRO, they spotted the very officer who had harassed her. Reema said, “I was writing my passport number down and I heard someone step into the cabin. The minute I heard his voice, I knew it was him. ‘This is the guy’, I told the officer... I asked him can you talk, to which he replied, ‘what do I talk?’ I told him, ‘You wanted to know answers to a few questions right? This is my husband. Why don’t you ask him?’ He spoke nothing.”Reema’s father-in-law Rohan (name changed) has sent a mail to the email id provided and also marked copies to the chief immigration officer and the local immigration officer on March 24 and demanded action against the officer.When BM contacted the home ministry, under which the Bureau of Immigration comes, a spokesperson said, “We are inquiring into the incident. If the details are found to be true, strict action will be taken against the officer concerned.”