IIT graduate denied Australia visa over fear of WMD proliferation

NEW DELHI: An aerospace engineer from IIT-Kanpur was denied a student visa by Australia because of suspicions he might be involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The episode came to light on Tuesday through tweets posted by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor seeking foreign minister Sushma Swaraj’s intervention.The student, Ananth SM, had applied for the visa in August 2015 after being offered a fully-funded PhD by University of Melbourne, Tharoor wrote in a letter to Swaraj, a photo of which he uploaded on Twitter. According to Tharoor, Ananth contacted him when his application failed to get a response even after 10 months.After Tharoor took up the matter with the Australian high commissioner here, Ananth was issued a letter which questioned his motive for going to Australia and, said Tharoor, and implied that he could be involved in the proliferation of WMDs.“I asked the high commissioner privately over email how an Indian scholar could be subject to such a bizarre suspicion, and stated that such a position is unacceptable since it clubs Indian nationals working in certain sectors with those of rogue nuclear states like North Korea and Pakistan,” Tharoor wrote in his letter.Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Ananth received a formal rejection of his visa application. Tharoor urged Sushma to urgently take up the matter with her Australian counterpart as the case “entails serious implications for India’s ties with Australia”.