New Delhi: US citizen and journalist with American media company Vice, Angad Singh was reportedly deported from IGI Airport in New Delhi on Wednesday, August 24 night, hours after his flight landed.
According to a report by the Indian Express, Singh’s family alleged that his flight landed at 8:30 pm and within three hours, he was sent back to the US.
Singh’s family expressed apprehensions that the American journalist was, perhaps, not allowed to remain in India because of his journalistic work. “Angad Singh covers South Asia. He had made a documentary on the Shaheen Bagh protest. The Government must be upset due to that documentary,” a family member was quoted as saying in the Express report.
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On Twitter, Singh has shared several video news reports produced by Vice which exposed flaws in India’s COVID response, too, covering topics such as overwhelmed crematoriums, the oxygen shortage during the deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections, reporting lacunae in COVID-death reporting from rural India, and more.
The family member further claimed that Singh had been denied a visa recently to make a documentary film about Dalits in the country, however, this time around, he was visiting for personal, not professional, reasons.
In a Facebook post, Singh’s mother, Gurmeet Kaur, expressed her dismay at her son being deported soon after landing in India.
“They didn’t give a reason. But we know it is his award winning journalism that scares them. 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 #ViceNews that gets to them,” Kaur wrote in the post.
“It’s not easy to be a Sikh, a Gursikh on top, a journalist, a warrior of truth and justice. Speaking truth has a price. We must pay it,” she wrote further, adding the post-script, “So which story do you think pissed them off?”