Joshua Rozenberg, the relatively sane husband of Melanie Phillips, has written an article on his recent trip to India.
To his great surprise, on Mr Rozenberg’s arrival in Madras without an Indian visa, the immigration official threatens to send him straight back to London. With the aid of the British High Commission, he manages to persuade an immigration official to issue him an emergency visa on the spot. Later, he mocks the Indians for the bureaucracy involved.
I recommend Mr Rozenberg tries flying into London on an Indian passport without a UK visa, and then evaluates which immigration service is the embarrassing one (alternatively, he could try the USA; there’s a small chance that they’d let him out of jail at some point).
And if I were an experienced lawyer and journalist who’d risked screwing up my foreign trip because I hadn’t bothered to check the visa requirements, but for whom my host country’s immigration service had kindly made an exception, then my reaction probably wouldn’t be to take the piss out of them in print for being bureaucratic…
I have frequently entered the US without a visa, though not as a journalist. For many years, UK passport holders have not needed visas to enter the US for non-journalistic purposes. Why should India have stricter requirements?
I accepted that I had made a mistake and needed to buy a temporary entry permit. The Indian authorities were happy to issue one after consular intervention. But why should that have been necessarry?
John B seems not to have noticed that I confessed, publicly, to having made a mistake. I did not need to tell my readers what had happened. At least I put my name to what I wrote.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
I did pick up a ‘what a stupid law; I can’t believe I almost got into trouble for breaking it’ impression when I read your article for my piece; looking over your article again, there is also some ‘oh, I’m so naive’-ness. So my tone was unnecessarily strong: sorry.
And I agree that making you buy visas in advance is silly, as is almost every aspect of immigration procedure almost everywhere.
Nonetheless, I’m still amazed that, as an experienced journalist, you made the mistake in the first place. It is *exactly* the same kind of error that got Elena Lappin locked in a cell and deported from the US: different countries have different entry restrictions, and you ignore them at your peril.
(and my full name is printed at the bottom of every page on this website, so I’m not quite sure what your point is there.)
Hell, I’ve been thrown out of the US with a valid visa.
I think the silliest system I’ve been through was in immediately post communist Poland. You needed a visa but you bought it at the airport on arrival. In zlotys, which it was illegal to have outside the country, but the exchange booth was the other side of passport checking.