Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Friday that 115 of the 315 international speakers cleared by India’s Ministry of External Affairs for the Bharat Summit in Hyderabad were refused entry to India or had their visas cancelled, apparently on the instructions of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. Tharoor, a former minister of state for external affairs, questioned the legal basis for the step and noted that the two day summit ends on Saturday, making the decisions impossible to reverse in time for the affected speakers to attend. Summit organisers’ counts in wider reporting put the number barred at between 113 and 115.
The summit, organised by the Congress party with the Telangana state government, opened on Friday with about 1,000 participants from around 70 countries, including Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, and is built around democracy, geopolitics, climate and progressive politics in the 80th year of Indian independence. The External Affairs Ministry had issued political clearance for the 315 speakers on November 3, subject to a standard clause reserving final entry clearance to the Home Ministry and security agencies. Among those affected was Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng Svendsen of the Oslo daily Dagsavisen, invited to speak on media and press freedom, who said the Indian Embassy advised her not to travel despite holding a valid visa, shortly before her flight.
Neither ministry has published an explanation of the individual decisions. Asked about Tharoor’s claim, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said only that visa matters are sovereign functions of any country or government, and did not address the number. The Home Ministry had not publicly responded to the allegation as of Friday evening.
The ruling BJP defended the cancellations. Union Coal Minister G. Kishan Reddy called the gathering an anti-India summit, and Telangana BJP president N. Ramchander Rao said on Saturday that people who had written and spoken against the government and the country were being invited with the intention of creating anarchy, and that cancelling a visa is any government’s prerogative. The opposition BRS party separately asked the Congress led state government to explain the summit’s benefit to Telangana. The summit is also set to launch a think tank, the Our World Institute, as a platform between the Global South and the Global North.