Angad Singh, a news producer for Vice News, was on his way to his home in Punjab when he was stopped by immigration officials at Delhi airport on August 24 night
India has allegedly deported an American journalist of Indian origin who was travelling to the country to visit his family.
American-Indian Angad Singh, a news producer for Vice News, was on his way to his home in Punjab when he was stopped by immigration officials at Delhi airport on August 24 night.
Gurmeet Kaur, Angad Singh’s mother, in a statement on Facebook pointed out that her son had been deported on the basis of his journalistic work as he had often been critical of the Indian government, according to a report in news.yahoo.com.
Kaur, who is a writer, began her statement by describing how she saw a Sikh boy around her age at the time, being “handcuffed and being taken away to be deported back to India”.
Singh was nominated for an Emmy award for his coverage of India’s second wave of the Covid pandemic last summer, when the Delta variant ravaged the country and crippled its largely public-funded medical infrastructure
“My heart tore. I spoke to him from a distance – to comfort him. He said he didn’t know the reason. He was tired of sitting down in plane rides and all he wanted to do was to lay down – his back hurt so bad. I wished him Chardikala [positive attitude].
“Today, A generation later, my son an American citizen who travelled 18 hours to Delhi to visit us in Punjab was deported. Put in the next flight back to New York,” she wrote. She also mentioned that officials did not provide a reason for sending him back to New York, but she said that her belief was it could be related to “his award winning journalism that scares them”.
Singh was nominated for an Emmy award for his coverage of India’s second wave of the Covid pandemic last summer, when the Delta variant ravaged the country and crippled its largely public-funded medical infrastructure.
“It is the stories he did and the stories he is capable of. It is the love for his motherland that they can’t stand. It is the cutting edge reporting of [Vice News] that gets to them,” Ms Kaur said.
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