New York, Sep 17 (IANS) A group of US musicologists and intellectuals are protesting an incident in which a British born, Indian origin music scholar was stopped from entering the US last year without any valid explanation.
One of them has even written a letter to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to resolve the issue.
Nalini Ghuman, a talented musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport last year while returning from Britain and was told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States.
Since then the American Musicological Society, many civil rights groups and other prominent academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York are spearheading a protest campaign.
Botstein had even written a letter to Rice, but the door has remained closed for Ghuman, an assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, who is British and who had lived, studied and worked in the US for 10 years before last year’s incident.
“This is an example of the xenophobia, incompetence, stupidity and then bureaucratic intransigence that we are up against,” Botstein told the New York Times in a report published Monday.
Early this year, Charles Atkinson, the president of the American Musicological Society, asked its 3,600 members to send letters to the State Department expressing their profound consternation and anxiety over the treatment of one of their members.
Ghuman’s trouble began on Aug 8, 2006, when she and her fiancé, Paul Flight, 47, returned to San Francisco from a research trip to Britain. Armed immigration officers met them at the airplane door and escorted Ghuman away.
“I don’t know why it’s happened, what I’m accused of. There’s no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely powerless,” Ghuman, 34, an Oxford graduate who earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, was quoted as saying by the Times from England.
“Officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks,” a written account of the ordeal faced by Ghuman, prepared by her lawyer said.
“She seems to be in this limbo,” Ghuman’s fiancé, Flight said. He has visited her three times in Britain and is considering a move there.
Held in a small room at the airport, she was groped during a body search. She was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention centre in Santa Clara, California, unless she left on a flight to London that night, the paper said.
Outside, Flight made frantic calls for help. He said the British Consulate tried to get through to the immigration officials in charge, to no avail. And Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.
“They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights,” Ghuman said. “For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means.”
Later, one officer eventually told her that her exclusion was probably a mistake, and advised her to reapply for a visa in London after a 10-day wait.
“The arbitrary and inexplicable exclusion of Ghuman has been a personal tragedy for her and a cause of distress to Mills and to American higher education,” said Janet L. Holmgren, the president of Mills College, who called her “one of our most distinguished faculty members”.
Ghuman was born in Wales. Her mother is a British homemaker, and her father, an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Wales, was born in India to a Sikh family and moved to Britain in the 1960s.
After a year of letters and inquiries, Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake.